Books published by Ipbooks

"Elizabeth Brunoski is a poet with a unique, rare voice that is immediate, spontaneous, intimate and memory-haunted on the one hand and yet sly, cool, ironic, analytic and worldly on the other as if she were not only distilling the brew of words out of a harvest of experience but intoxicating the reader poem by poem as well. It is impossible not to be mesmerized and enchanted as these poems work their magic on you. "Eugene Mahon

With the papers in this volume, I want to turn a spotlight onto this forgotten dimension of our mental life. I have selected essays that expand and develop the trunk of Freud's original notion into a differentiated concept that now can be used as an integral part of our theoretical and clinical thinking. My hope is that the reader will gain a new sense of self- and object-preservative needs and anxieties, which are pervasive but often almost unnoticeable as they pave the ground in the depths of an unconscious territory that waits to be revealed and analyzed. This book is organized into four sections preceded by an introduction in which I present a brief and easily accessible summary of the main self-preservative drive, elaborating and integrating it into our contemporary theory of the mind. To me, this opened a door to a new, still-unexplored, and mostly unconscious part of the mind.

Psychoanalysis in Fashion, the editors have assembled a series of riveting essays that span a broad range of connections between the unconscious mind and its expression in the dressing and adornment of the self. Fashion trends, hairdos, jewelry, and even cross-dressing are all fair game for the book's bold expositions and intriguing ideas. Conscious and unconscious fantasies play large roles in dressing up, which itself shapes, expresses, and even conceals portions of identity. Ultimately, we are shown how we banish the animal body while cloaking ourselves in cultural glory. Danielle Knafo, Author, Dancing with the Unconscious and The Age of PerversionPsychoanalysis and Fashion is a much needed contribution to the psychoanalytic literature on the body, particularly the body as looked at. Katz and Richards and their co-authors have us think about the body and its accoutrements from psychodynamic, interpersonal and sociological perspectives. Clothing, as well as jewelry, hair styles, tattoos reveal, as well as conceal, social status, gender identity and sexual availability. It is a page-turner: delightful, delicious, at times personal while being scholarly. It covers the myriad complex aspects that make up a "fashion identity". Janice Liebermanm Author, Body Talk: Looking and Being Looked at in Psychotherapy

I set myself a very hard task. In this short book I will present what I believe to be a major paradigm shift in human understanding and discourse. My goal is to intrigue you, coax you to think and behave in new ways, and convince you to become part of a movement.This movement will lead to1) a new way of communicating across human divides2) a new language to codify that process3) a different education for our children4) creative solutions to intractable conflicts5) the ability to slow down or abort humankind's leap to war6) a shift in the direction of human consciousness and evolution7) an exciting, challenging and rewarding adventure into unknown territoriesIf you're going to consider my idea, you'll need to imagine this possibility: The next leap in the evolution of our species will happen with conscious understanding and conscious intent, as a new language for communication across human divides emerges.

From the Preface:"Thus God and Nature link'd the gen'ral frame, And bade Self-love and Social be the same."Pope [i]The Argument of Pope could be the argument of this book. It is remarkable that he wrote it in 1733 foretelling so many modern themes. That the total set of interrelations of the universe must include society (Hegel), that everything stands in relationship to everything else (Darwin), that happiness and love are reciprocal (Freud), that reason is a continuation of instinct (Darwin), that instinct produces social institutions (Veblen), that patriarchy had a historical origin as did religion, and that therefore unlike material imperatives they are reversible (Morgan, Meszaros), that governments based on love and those based on fear are antipodes (Marx), and that true self-love results in public good (Adam Smith). These are all themes of this book, based on the Spinozist principle that God and Nature are one, and therefore God is only the good sense of nature, its awesome intelligence of which humanity partakes. This shows how old the fundamental ideas of this book are. Our lack of action is not due to lack of ideas.The title of the book expresses its main thesis. Freud got close but answering the question but his ideology blurred his vision to the dialectical nature of instinct, to the effect that altruism, the phenomenon that so productively puzzled Darwin, is his Eros, the feminine instinct. Thanatos its opposite unrestrained manifests itself in constant war today. This is based in the Freud-Einstein correspondence after, in 1931, the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation invited Einstein to a cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas about politics and peace with a thinker of his choosing. Einstein chose Freud and asked hum Why War? within the parameters of might and right that Freud, interestingly, substituted for violence and right. Einstein was hoping for a psychological explanation and Freud answered only partially and rather hopelessly through his instinctual construct of-Thanatos but rather unilaterally and mechanically.[ii] Freud did not see his contradiction: that his whole theory of culture was based on sublimation and therefore the question why is war an exception to sublimation? This book endeavors to answer this question by placing history in the psychoanalytic couch in the first part, by interpreting its trauma that repressed altruism. A deeply traumatized animal species, we ourselves inflicted the trauma when we abandoned the morality of evolution,[iii] and compromised our inherent moral uprightness.

emma and her selves is the story of a long term psychotherapeutic relationship between a woman with multiple identities, someone diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder. Dr. May Benatar shares some of her own process as a therapist discovering the ubiquity of trauma in both the general population and in clinical populations. As she begins to treat victims of childhood sexual abuse she comes to understand that dissociation and the creation of sequestered part selves are the common consequence of trauma.Along the way she meets Emma and her many selves and is changed over the 20 years of their work together. She learns that "parts" exist in all of us, we all have many faces, many states of mind that are called forth in different circumstance. The difference between Emma and more ordinary folks is the degree of access we have to these states and our ability to integrate them within a whole personality. Dr. Benatar becomes more familiar with her own parts in the process of treating Emma.There are obstacles and triumphs, mystery and spiritual encounter threaded throughout the narrative.

This book of essays takes an informal and, I hope, gentle look into South Asian homes, hearts, and homeland in an attempt to help mental health practitioners have a more complete understanding of their Indian clients. My aim is that these stories, anecdotes, and social and psychological sketches open the door to more pertinent clinical conversations. Just as there is no mother without a child, there is no Indian individual without the family. The focus of western psychotherapy has been on the individual and individuation. My book expands the picture to include the importance of Indian society, family, and culture as an equally, if not more important, path to helping Indian immigrant patients get more clarity from helping professionals.

Dr. Mali Mann is one of the most productive members of our Physician Writers Group. It is very gratifying to see her collect her poems - many of which she has presented at our public readings on Campus - into a single volume. The collection highlights the breadth of her poetic skills, dealing with issues as disparate as immigration, grief brought on by family transitions, a patient's decline, or homesickness. She captures the deeply elegiac feel of being a physician and human, while echoing her rich Iranian cultural heritage. This volume celebrates her many years of writing in a beautiful voice. All of us, patients, doctors and lay people will benefit from her emotional wisdom.Hans Steiner, MD. Professor of Psychiatry and Human Development, Stanford University, School of Medicine, Director, The Pegasus Physician Writers at Stanford

I have, in this collection, placed 20 of my articles that have been previously published separately in refereed psychoanalytic journals or as chapters in psychoanalytic books. The papers are ordered in six "Parts," not chronologically but according to subject matter that fits together by topic or area of interest. Each part involves a topic that had customarily been thought of in binary terms, but may now may now be thought of not as "either/or" theoretical and clinical issues, but more integratively. Of utmost importance to the nature of my thinking as I put this work together, is the fact that I had not always known that a paper developing and arguing issues on one subject would some day turn out to be intimately and significantly related to a paper developing and arguing issues on another subject. It was only after the fact that I discovered the connections. But is that not exactly how we expect our minds to preconsciously learn and then influence our consciously grasped ideas and outcomes?

A fascinating compendium of ar+cles that look at trauma through a myriad of lenses-existential neuroscience, history, psychoanalysis, sociology, trauma+c stress research, literature-these beautifly crafted essays engage the reader throughout. Dori Laub's research into the importance of witnessing and gathering testimony from victims of severe trauma-whether related to the Holocaust, sexual abuse, or war-to help them create narratives out of what was inchoate pain, is central to so many of the contributors. Research is used as witness in Robert Jay Lipton's work and so too is literature as in Schreiber's discussion of Toni Morrison's fiction. The chapters on brain research help us to better understand the individual and social impact of trauma and how much has been learned in recent years that influences the way clinicians interact with patients. Bringing together a neurobiological and psychological understanding of trauma, Schreiber's edited volume is an essential book for psychoanalysts who want to have a more thorough understanding of trauma as well as for all those in other disciplines who are interested in the subject. -Batya R. Monder, MSW, BCD, Training & Supervising Analyst, Contemporary Freudian Society (CFS)

From the foreword by Steven Ellman, PhD: The reader who has not read the papers in this volume is in for a rare treat: the discovery of new worlds revealed within what were thought to be familiar spaces. I believe that those who have already read some of the chapters in this volume will have the experience of rediscovering precious clinical and theoretical gems that have influenced many therapists and analysts. In fact, Bach’s influence has quietly spread throughout the field often without various authors fully acknowledging or perhaps realizing his impact on their concepts. I feel certain that readers will share my excitement in reading the chapters in this current volume.Undoubtedly Bach is known for many other contributions to the analytic situation as compared to his statements about analytic trust. For example, he provides us with descriptions of several types of transference in the treatment of narcissistic patients. He features interventions to help bridge the various divides in narcissistic patients. He also points out that in the type of treatments he describes the “analyst's own narcissistic equilibrium is always strongly put to the test.” Thus, while I have mentioned that in all of his papers he implicitly describes the therapeutic situation, one might more accurately that he is always looking at the transference-countertransference balance that oscillates in the treatment of narcissistic patients. Of course, it is not surprising that he describes both sides of the analytic couch in sensitive detail. I venture that most (perhaps all) analysts will find important aspects of various patients exquisitely described and understood in this volume. In addition, they will find strong elements of themselves pictured and empathically brought to life. 

This is the first comprehensive work emerging from psychoanalysis correlating with a   contemporary “information” paradigm and “inter-penetrative” world view. As such it examines interrelationships between forms of communication and the development of “mind” and conscious awareness, maintaining that these process-phenomena are integral to psychoanalytic methodology. Psychoanalytic situations here become research venues for a metatheoretical study of human communication from a bio-semiotic perspective that examines emergent forms of pre-semiotic and linguistic interactions in a six-stage developmental model of unconscious and conscious modes of communication. The now vastly expanded interpretive purview of the psychoanalytic semantic thereby becomes an empirical window into the evolution, development, and transformative potential of conscious awareness as it is constructed through our specialized dialogues. By focusing on the forms of interaction themselves the study lifts the locus of observation out of both relational and classical positions and into a developmental/evolutionary framework, providing overarching principles for theory and practice in a unified psychoanalytic metapsychology. This book is for anyone who wants to deepen their understanding of the psychoanalytic and supervisory processes and the dialogical phenomena arising therein.