Books in the Margaret S. Mahler series

Thicker Than Blood addresses in depth the impact of adoption on biological parents, adoptive parents, adopted children, and siblings.

The Rape of Childhood: Development, Clinical, and Sociocultural Aspects of Childhood Sexual Abuse details the realm of childhood sexual abuse. Contributors examine variables that increase a child's vulnerability to maltreatment, including age, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic factors, and outline various consequences of childhood sexual abuse.

Revenge: Narcissistic Injury, Rage, and Retaliation addresses the ubiquitous human wish to take revenge and settle scores. Featuring the contributions of eleven distinguished mental health professionals, this book offers a wide range of deep perspectives on the real or imagined narcissistic injuries that often underlie fantasies of revenge and the behavioral trait of vindictiveness.

Each human heart possesses positive attributes such as altruism, kindness, concern, gratitude, and forgiveness. Human Goodness explores the origins of these traits through the use of clinical vignettes to help mental health professionals see their clients in refreshingly new ways.

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.

From childhood onwards, humans use their environmentΓÇÖs responses to construct models or schemata to link feelings and impulses with actions and effects. If the environment during those formative years is unreliable, frustrating, or violating, the construction of those internal models can be disrupted and create a disjointed perception of the world, where violence is the only way to feel strong or good about oneself. Before and After Violence explores the complex network of experiences and relationships that contribute to both the origins and consequences of violence, starting in the early stages of life and compounding over time. The contributors to this collection examine the different settings in which violence takes place, look at the variables that propel its occurrence in local and global instances, and depict how each can be traced back to profound feelings of betrayal, helplessness, and anger that manifest in the physical discharges of aggression towards a single person or a whole group. Through a psychoanalytic lens, the contributors analyze and explain violence in its many forms, delve into its myriad of causes, as well as offer a variety of solutions that can be applied to various instances of violence whether it be physical or mental, self-directed or other-directed.

The New Motherhoods: Patterns of Early Child Care in Contemporary Culture offers innovative perspectives in psychotherapy that accommodate emerging pathways to parenthood, changing roles of mothers, and evolving patterns of family structure. Moms come in all shapes and sizes, and psychoanalytic developmental theory could be modified to better embrace modern mothers and today s childcare practices. In this volume, distinguished clinical psychologists and psychoanalysts offer divergent conceptual perspectives on what shapes contemporary mothering, including the increasing number of single mothers in our society, the additional challenges faced by immigrating mothers, how technology affects the parent-child relationship, and gender identity in families today. Incorporating the most current research along with engaging clinical vignettes, The New Motherhoods provides mental health professionals with an invaluable collection of insights into modern motherhood and its essential role in the care and healthy development of children."

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.

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.

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.

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

Discusses affect - its origins, development, and uses - and how it is viewed in a clinical setting.

Sibling relationships and rivalry are as old as recorded history. This analysis explores that ambivalence between siblings casts its shadow throughout people's lifetimes and affects their choices of mates, relationships with their own children, and aversions to others.

Guilt: Origins, Manifestations, and Management is replete with clinical pearls and highly useful tips for the management of patients driven by feelings of guilt and remorse. Eight distinguished psychoanalysts address the ubiquitous phenomenon of guilt, describing the childhood experiences that form the bedrock of this emotion. They critically assess previously published findings, review diverse theories, and offer illustrative material from the treatment of children and adults.

The Mother and Her Child: Clinical Aspects of Attachment, Separation, and Loss, edited by Salman Akhtar, focuses upon the formation of an individual''s self in the crucible of the early mother-child relationship. Bringing together contributions from distinguished psychoanalysts and child observational researchers, it elucidates the nuances of mothering, the child''s tie to the mother, the mysteries of secure attachment, and the hazards of insecure attachment. These experts also discuss issues of separation, loss, and alternate sources of love when the mother is absent or emotionally unavailable, while highlighting the relevance of such ideas to the treatment of children and adults.

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.

Guilt: Origins, Manifestations, and Management is replete with clinical pearls and highly useful tips for the management of patients driven by feelings of guilt and remorse. Eight distinguished psychoanalysts address the ubiquitous phenomenon of guilt, describing the childhood experiences that form the bedrock of this emotion. They critically assess previously published findings, review diverse theories, and offer illustrative material from the treatment of children and adults.

The Electrified Mind explores the positive and negative aspects of the internet and other communication technologies on the people who use them in order to help mental health care professionals understand, empathize with, and treat patients who rely on technology for socializing and expressing themselves.

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.

Fidelity: from cannibalism to imperialism & beyond/intimacy & individuation/egocentricity.