Treating People with Psychosis in Institutions: A Psychoanalytic Perspective, by Belinda Mackie

How to Understand Institutions that Care for Patients

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There are many paths that offer an understanding of the experience of people with psychosis, and numerous ways to consider the nature of institutional treatment approaches.  This book presents psychoanalysis as one path that provides a conceptual foundation for both the treatment of psychotic conditions and how to understand institutions that care for patients. It focuses on the priority that psychoanalysis places on the individual, how the treatment is conceived theoretically and the ways it can be incorporated in the overall organisation of an institution.

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Psychiatric Rehabilitation: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Recovery, by Dr Raman Kapur MBE

Therapeutic atmospheres can be created anywhere

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One flew into the cuckoo’s nest—but how do we help them get out?  We are all familiar with the usual images of the film and many of us have worked in mental health units and found wanting the knowledge base we have been presented with to help patients recover from mental ill health and get out of ‘the nest’ (hospital).

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Why Dignity Matters, by Susan S. Levine

Write or Wrong: What Patients Tell Me About Dignity and Psychoanalytic Treatment

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“The talking cure.”  These words were first uttered by Bertha Pappenheim, Anna O., and adapted by Freud to refer to the basic method of psychoanalysis. The patient’s free associations must be paired with the analyst’s evenly hovering attention: loose, flexible listening characterized by deep concentration. It is this combination of talking and listening that results in the magnification of signification – and in its dignification.

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Couple Dynamics, by Aleksandra Novakovic

Psychoanalytic perspectives in work with the individuals, the couple, and the group

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This book presents psychoanalytic thinking about the phenomenon of the couple and couple dynamics in internal and external reality and at different levels of organisation: the ‘couple’ in the individual’s internal world, the dynamics between partners in a couple relationship, and the dynamics between the couple and the group. It will interest professionals from different disciplines who find couple dynamics relevant in their work.

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Filming Bion’s ‘A Memoir of the Future’, by Meg Harris Williams

The Becoming Room

This book, whose writing spans 33 years, records a series of experiments in dramatizing Bion’s A Memoir of the Future. The main project was an unfinished film made in Delhi in 1983 under the auspices of Donald Meltzer, Martha Harris, and the Roland Harris Educational Trust.

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‘The lonely, isolated, unwanted, mocked, and misunderstood’: Some comments on Asperger’s disorder, by Robin Holloway

Refining the Spectrum: We Need Better Diagnostic Distinctions for Children with AS

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Lonely, isolated, unwanted, mocked, shunned, rejected, denigrated, despised, ostracized, misunderstood and friendless: stringing together so many negative adjectives may seem a little bit exaggerated – but that’s exactly the point I am trying to make. My recent book, Asperger’s Children: Psychodynamics, Aetiology, Diagnosis, and Treatment shows how Asperger’s children have exactly these kinds of negatively ‘exaggerated’ perceptions and feelings. Adjectives like these have been applied to these children many times over the years. This is the way they most frequently describe and experience themselves. Their inner experience of the social world can with few exceptions be summarized in three words – untrustworthy, unjust and unfair.

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