Learning from Experience Guidebook for Clinicians [Hardcover]

An important task facing all clinicians, and especially challenging for younger, less experienced clinicians, is to come to know oneself sufficiently to be able to register the patient's experience in useful and progressively deeper ways.  In an effort to aid younger clinicians in the daily struggle to know thyself, Marilyn Charles turns to key ideas that have facilitated her own clinical work with difficult patients.  Concepts such as container and contained, transitional space, projective identification, and transference/countertransference are introduced not as academic ideas, but as aspects of the therapeutic environment that elicit greater creativity and vitality on the therapist's part.  In Charles's skillful hands, the basic ideas of Klein, Winnicott, and Bion become newly comprehensible without losing depth and richness; they come to life in the fulcrum of daily clinical encounter.Foreword - Nancy McWilliams
1. Introduction
2. The Role of Theory
3. Myth: Models of Reality
4. Container and Contained
5. Symptoms: Marking the Spot
6. Klein's Paranoid Schizoid and Depressive Positions
7. Transitional Space and the Use of an Object
8. Projective Identification
9. Truth and Lies
10. Patterns
11. Patterns as Templates: Understanding Transference
12. Empathic Resonance: The Role of Countertransference
13. Play: Opening up the Space
14. Conclusion

Learning from Experiencegoes to the heart of important psychoanalytic theories, integrating them with clinical material. Written beautifully and with feeling, it will help novice therapists to appreciate the opportunity for growth as well as service that our profession remarkably affords. The need for this book will be renewed with every new class of students. Surely it will become the classic it deserves to be.  

- Johanna Tabin, Ph.D., ABPP, Chicago Cenl£&