Playing and Vitality in Psychoanalysis

Giuseppe Civitarese, Antonino Ferro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000604665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Building on their long-lasting scientific partnership, Civitarese and Ferro offer an array of thought-provoking writings bolstered by extensive clinical material, attesting to their shared interpretation of psychoanalysis not only as a treatment for psychic suffering but also as inherently pleasurable and vitalizing.

In chapters that reflect inclinations, fantasies and obsessions that are both shared and personal, and by engaging with topics various enough to include dreams, ethics, emotions and aesthetics, the authors demonstrate how the practice of psychoanalysis might no longer be an insidiously moralistic or ideological exercise but rather a practice aimed at opening up and liberating the mind. By providing detailed engagement with the work of Bion and Ogden, as well as insights from their own substantial expertise, the authors explore how the synonymous concepts of playing and vitality can meaningfully inform and change clinical psychoanalytic practice.

With rich clinical material and a strong foundation in established theory, this book will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic therapists and postgraduate students hoping to make more room in the psychoanalytic lexicon for words like pleasure, dreaming, creativity, hospitality and growth.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• I Dreams, transformations, deconstructions
• II Vitality as a theoretical and technical parameter in psychoanalysis
• III Attacks on linking, or uncontainability of beta elements?
• IV On Bion’s concept of container/contained
• V Divergences
• VI The birth of the psyche and intercorporeity
• VII Going for a stroll: The root of emotions
• VIII Towards an ethics of responsibility: Notes in the margins of Bion/Rickman correspondence
• IX Freud’s Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning: A possibly irreverent comment
• X Ogden’s parentheses, or the continuity between conscious and unconscious experience
• XI Reality and fictions: People (story), internal objects (unconscious fantasies), characters (casting)
• XII Internet and simultaneous life
• XIII The pleasure of the analytic session
• XIV Aesthetics and writing in psychoanalysis
• Editorial notes
• Index