Not in the United States?The Embedded Self
A Psychoanalytic Guide to Family Therapy
- By Mary Joan Gerson
- Price: $50.00 $45.00
- Binding: Hardback
- Pages: 288
- Published by: Routledge
- Publication Date: 1st May 1996
- ISBN: 978-0-88163-158-6
About the Book
The Embedded Self is a thoughtful and illuminating introduction to family treatment tailored to the sensibilities of psychoanalytically oriented clinicians. Skilled in both modalities, Mary-Joan Gerson provides the psychoanalytic reader with a genial overview of the family therapy movement, its history, its organizing concepts, and its interventions. Basic family therapy approaches to development, diagnosis, and clinical engagement, as well as practical questions (such as when to refer and how to share information with colleagues) all fall within her purview.
But more importantly, The Embedded Self takes up the intellectual challenge of an alternative therapeutic modality to engage crucial questions about the therapeutic process. Pivoting her juxtaposition of the two forms of treatment on basic psychodynamic principles, Gerson invites the reader to appreciate how concepts developed for understanding the individual psyche are necessarily transformed when applied to the redundant communication patterns characteristic of family systems. The result is a striking reappraisal of the nature and possibilities of psychodynamic intervention in which psychoanalysis and family therapy stand as figure and ground to one another, each shedding new light on the fundamental principles of the other.
The Embedded Self is a timely work that succeeds at different levels - as introduction, as guidebook, and as invitation to renewed reflection on the nature of the self and the dynamics of therapeutic change. Engagingly written and liberally illustrated with sensitive clinical vignettes, it is destined to inform all future discussions of the complementary nature of individual and family interventions.
Reviews
"Like a book of Borges' poetry that I read in both Spanish and English, The Embedded Self brings intellectual challenge and esthetic pleasure. Any clinicians, whether systemic or psychodynamic, will find this book an enriching and thought-provoking experience."
- Salvador Minuchin, M.D., Research Professor of Psychiatry, NYU Medical Center
"A brilliant and long overdue rapprochement between psychoanalysis and family therapy conceived by a practitioner trained and experienced in both modalities of treatment. Although primarily directed to psychoanalysts interested in expanding their clinical repertories, this book also offers family therapists an excellent overview of their own field."
- Edgar Levenson, M.D., Training and Supervising Analyst, William Alanson White Institute
"With an admirable sensitivity at once clinical, theoretical, and literary, Dr. Gerson explores two very different approaches to human suffering: psychoanalysis and family therapy. What distinguishes the book throughout is the richness of clinical material that is examined from different perspectives. There are few scholar-clinicians anywhere who are as qualified as Mary-Joan Gerson to undertake an exploration of this order. We are all in her debt."
- Jerome S. Bruner, Ph.D., Research Professor of Psychology, NYU
"In her masterful meditation on the figure-ground relationship between psychoanalytic and systemic thinking, Mary-Joan Gerson has brought each tradition into fresh focus, providing the clinician and theoretician alike with richly textured insights and innovative therapeutic techniques."
- Virginia Goldner, Ph.D., Senior Faculty, Ackerman Institute for Family Therapy
"This book is so outstanding an analysis of science and therapy that it is essential reading for those dealing with human suffering and trauma. It transcends psychoanalysis and family therapy both, and observes the human condition objectively and, at the same time, with compassion and warmth."
- Monty N. Weinstein, Psy.D., Readings
The Gendered Unconscious
The Psychotic Wavelength
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