Desire, Self, Mind, and the Psychotherapies: Unifying Psychological Science and Psychoanalysis [Hardcover]

Desire, Self, Mind, and the Psychotherapiesunifies psychological science with contemporary relational psychoanalysis, arguing that the disciplines can be integrated if the concept of repression is understood as motivated forgetting, creative aspects of unconscious processes are taken into account in cognitive science, and a new experiences model of change is acknowledged by psychoanalysts. Such a model of change allows for integration of behavioral, cognitive, visual, and other techniques into a psychoanalytically-informed psychotherapy.

This book will be of interest to mental health professionals, psychoanalysts, psychologists, and psychotherapists.

In this exceptionally readable and engaging book, Rebecca Curtis explains and integrates the clinically most useful and scientifically most tenable insights from relational psychoanalysis, cognitive and social psychology, and affective neuroscience. Much of existing psychoanalytic writing is words about words, speculative theories about prior speculative theoriesbad poetry that meshes poorly with the growing body of empirical evidence in psychology and neuroscience. Curtis adroitly sidesteps or cuts through the accumulated verbiage and, without bias or rancor, offers a thoughtful, very wide-ranging, deeply anchored, and refreshingly realistic conception of desire, self, mind, and psychological transformation. The book will be extremely useful to both clinicians and researchers. Phillip R. Shaver, University of California, Davis

Rebecca Curtis' book represents what to my mind is the direction that psychoanalysis needs to take if it is to prosper and even survive. As Curtis points out in her book, psychoanalysis and psychology have existed in 'splendid isolation.' It is time to bring together and attempt to integrate findings and theories from these two different perspectilC(