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Making a Difference in Patients' Lives

Emotional Experience in the Therapeutic Setting

• By Sandra Buechler

• Price: $34.95 $31.46
• Binding: Paperback (also available in Hardback)
• Pages: 336
• Published by: Routledge
• Publication Date: 6th June 2008
• ISBN: 978-0-88163-494-5

About the Book

Within the title of her book, Making a Difference in Patients' Lives, Sandra Buechler echoes the hope of all clinicians. But, she counters, experience soon convinces most of us that insight, on its own, is often not powerful enough to have a significant impact on how a life is actually lived. Many clinicians and therapists have turned toward emotional experience, within and outside the treatment setting, as a resource. How can the immense power of lived emotional experience be harnessed in the service of helping patients live richer, more satisfying lives?

Most patients come into treatment because they are too anxious, or depressed, or don’t seem to feel alive enough. Something is wrong with what they feel, or don’t feel. Given that the emotions operate as a system, with the intensity of each affecting the level of all the others, it makes sense that it would be an emotional experience that would have enough power to change what we feel. But, ironically, the wider culture, and even psychoanalysts, seem to favor "solutions" that aim to mute emotionality, rather than relying on one emotion to modify another. We turn to pharmaceutical, cognitive, or behavioral change to make a difference in how life feels. Because we are afraid of emotional intensity, we cut off our most powerful source of regulation.

In clear, jargon-free prose that utilizes both clinical vignettes and excerpts from poetry, art, and literature, Buechler explores how the power to feel can become the power to change. Through an active empathic engagement with the patient and an awareness of the healing potential inherent in each of our fundamental emotions, the clinician can make a substantial difference in the patient’s capacity to embrace life.

Reviews

"Sandra Buechler breaks the mold with Making A Difference in Patients' Lives. Aimed at teaching and inspiring those who do clinical work, Dr. Buechler has produced an instructive clinical book that is both practical and poetic. Strongly advocating for deep emotional experience as essential for change, she does not hesitate to discuss her own feelings and what it means to her to be a therapist. She succeeds at a task that is rarely attempted - defining therapy as both deeply personal and profoundly professional."

- Karen J. Maroda, Ph.D., ABPP, Medical College of Wisconsin

"Dr. Buechler has again succeeded in integrating key principles of emotion theory and her psychodynamic approach to therapy. In this book the discussion of emotion-cognition interactions is quite sophisticated, as when she acknowledges the frequent occurrence of emotions in meaningful patterns. Her treatment of the potentially adaptive role of emotions in behavior change should prove quite helpful to practicing therapists."

- Carroll E. Izard, Ph.D., Trustees Distinguished Professor, University of Delaware

Table of Contents

Introduction: Meaningfully Impacting Patients' Lives. Basic Assumptions About Human Emotions. Empathic Recovery of Emotional Balance. Empathic Responses to Shame. Facing Painful Regret. Joy as a Universal Antidote. Grief. Empowering and Disorienting Anger. Special Section - Training: Nurturing the Capacity to Make a Difference. Thinking Analytically. Emotional Preparation for Practicing Psychoanalysis. Developing the Personal Strengths of a Psychoanalyst in Sum: Making a Difference.

About the Author(s)

Sandra Buechler, Ph.D., is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City. She also supervises at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center and at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy. A member of the editorial board of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, she is the author of Clinical Values: Emotions that Guide Psychoanalytic Treatment (Analytic Press, 2004), and has written papers on the analyst's experiences of loneliness, loss, joy, and other aspects of the clinician's feelings.

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