Books in the Margaret S. Mahler series

This edited collection presents the work of internationally renowned psychoanalysts and their contributions to child development theory. Contributors focus on clinical and research-based advances and elucidate conceptualizations of separation-individuation theory.

Offers answers to questions about the nature of hatred. This book addresses the emergence of hatred in the clinical situation, including infant observation, gender differences, child abuse, severe character pathology, multiple personality, countertransference difficulties, literary characters, racial prejudice, ethnic hatred, and war.

This book aims to help therapists enhance their empathy with patients who are compelled to lie and to provide them with better therapeutic strategies to deal with the clinical dilemmas that arise in working with such children and adults.

Mourning and the importance of the capacity to bear some helplessness, while still finding pleasure in life, are central to this tightly organized volume. The multi-faceted processes involved in mourning and adaptation are addressed.

Includes papers that take seriously the fact that patients are affected by their religious convictions.

Across the lifespan we may experience moments of sublime intimacy, suffocating closeness, comfortable solitude, and intolerable distance or closeness. This work demonstrates how boundaries, by delineating and containing the self, secure one's conscious and unconscious experience of entity and of self-governance.

Death is a much avoided topic. Literature on mourning exists, but it focuses chiefly upon the death of others. The inevitable psychic impact of one''s own mortality is not optimally covered either in this literature on mourning or elsewhere in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. The Wound of Mortality brings together contributions from distinguished psychoanalysts to fill this gap by addressing the issue of death in a comprehensive manner. Among questions the contributors raise and seek to answer are: Do children understand the idea of death? How is adolescent bravado related to deeper anxieties about death? Is it normal and even psychologically healthy to think about one''s own death during middle age? Does culture-at-large play a role in how individuals conceptualize the role of death in human life? Is death "apart" from or "a part" of life? Enhanced understanding of such matters will help mental health clinicians treat patients struggling with death-related concerns with greater empathy.

Mental health professionals, while trained to treat psychopathology, are insufficiently informed of human resilience of how what intrapsychic, interpersonal, and psychosocial factors are operative in adaptive coping with trauma. This book addresses the matter of resilience from the vantage point of the authors' personal and clinical experiences.

Addresses the critical psychoanalytic issue of effective listening. This work considers the listening process from the so-called two-person perspective - that is, that which is aligned with intersubjective, interpersonal, and relational theories.