Joyce Anne Slochower - Holding and Psychoanalysis, 2nd edition: A Relational Perspective

In Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective, Joyce Slochower brings a sophisticated contemporary framework to bear on Winnicott's notion of the holding environment. Revisiting holding's clinical impact and theoretical underpinnings, Slochower explores its function in those moments when neither interpretive nor intersubjective work can be tolerated. She expands the holding construct beyond the needs of dependent patients by examining its therapeutic shape across the clinical spectrum.

This second edition has been substantially rewritten to incorporate new theoretical and clinical material. Two new chapters address holding's impact on interior experience; a third describes its function in acts of memorialization across the lifespan; still another chapter updates the place of developmental metaphors in contemporary thinking and formulates holding's function in buffering shame states.

Slochower situates holding within a relational frame that encompasses both deliberate and enacted aspects. In her view, the analyst doesn't hold alone; patient and analyst together bracket disjunctive elements to establish a co-constructed holding space. The book pays particular attention to the analyst's experience, offering rich clinical vignettes that illustrate the struggle that holding entails. Holding and Psychoanalysis offers a clear and incisive exploration of common therapeutic knots and how weand our patientsnegotiate them.

Joyce Slochower is Professor Emerita at Hunter College and Graduate Center, the City University of New York, and the author of Psychoanalytic Collisions (Routledge, 2006). She is on the Faculty of the New York University Postdoctoral Program, the National Training Program of the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, the Steven Mitchell Center, the Philadelphia Center for Relational Studies, and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California in San Francisco. She is in private practice in New York City.

RELATIONAL PERSPECTIVES BOOK SERIES
Lewis Aron & Adrienne Harris

The Relational Perspectives Book Series (RPBS) publishes books that grow out of or contribute to the relational tradition in contemporary psychoanalysis. The term relational psychoanalysis was first used by Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) to bridge the traditions of interpersonal relations, as developed within interpersonal psychoanalysis and object relations, as developed within contemporary British theory. But, under the seminal work of the late Stephen Mitchell, the term relational psychoanalysis grew and began to accrue to itself many other influences and developments. Various tributariesinterpersonal psychoanalysis, object relations theory, self psychology, empirical infancy research, and elements of contemporary Freudian and Kleinian thoughtflow into this tradition, which understands relational configurations between self and others, both real and fantasied, as the primary subject of psychoanalytic investigation.

We refer to the relational tradition, rather than to a relational school, to highlight that we are identifying a trend, a tendency within contemporary psychoanalysis, not a more formally organized or coherent school or system of beliefs. Our use of the term relational signifies a dimension of theory and practice that has become salient across the wide spectrum of contemporary psychoanalysis. Now under the editorial supervision of Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris, the Relational Perspectives Book Series originated in 1990 under the editorial eye of the late Stephen A. Mitchell. Mitchell was the most prolific and influential of the originators of the relational tradition. He was committed to dialogue among psychoanalysts and he abhorred the authoritarianism that dictated adherence to a rigid set of beliefs or technical restrictions. He championed open discussion, comparative and integrative approaches, and he promoted new voices across the generations.

Included in the Relational Perspectives Book Series are authors and works that come from within the relational tradition, extend and develop the tradition, as well as works that critique relational approaches or compare and contrast it with alternative points of view. The series includes our most distinguished senior psychoanalysts along with younger contributors who bring fresh vision.

Vol.56
HOLDING AND PSYCHOANALYSIS:
A Relational Perspective
Joyce Slochower

Vol.55
A PSYCHOTHERAPY FOR THE PEOPLE:
Toward a Progressive Psychoanalysis
Lewis Aron & Karen Starr

Vol.54
THE SILENT PAST AND THE INVISIBLE PRESENT:
Memory, Trauma, and Representation in Psychotherapy
Paul Renn

Vol.53
INDIVIDUALIZING GENDER AND SEXUALITY:
Theory and Practice
Nancy Chodorow

Vol.52
RELATIONAL PSYCHOANALYSIS, VOL. V:
Evolution of Process
Lewis Aron & Adrienne Harris (eds.)

Vol.51
RELATIONAL PSYCHOANALYSIS, VOL. IV:
Expansion of Theory
Lewis Aron & Adrienne Harris (eds.)

Vol.50
WITH CULTURE IN MIND:
Psychoanalytic Stories
Muriel Dimen (ed.)

Vol.49
UNDERSTANDING AND TREATING DISSOCIATIVE IDENTITY DISORDER:
A Relational Approach
Elizabeth F. Howell

Vol.48
TOWARD MUTUAL RECOGNITION:
Relational Psychoanalysis and the Christian Narrative
Marie T. Hoffman

Vol.47
UPROOTED MINDS:
Surviving the Politics of Terror in the Americas
Nancy Caro Hollander

Vol.46
A DISTURBANCE IN THE FIELD:
Essays in Transference-Countertransference Engagement
Steven H. Cooper

Vol.45
FIRST DO NO HARM:
The Paradoxical Encounters of Psychoanalysis, Warmaking, and Resistance
Adrienne Harris & Steven Botticelli (eds.)

Vol.44
GOOD ENOUGH ENDINGS:
Breaks, Interruptions, and Terminations from Contemporary Relational Perspectives
Jill Salberg (ed.)

Vol.43
INVASIVE OBJECTS:
Minds under Siege
Paul Williams

Vol.42
SABERT BASESCU:
Selected Papers on Human Nature and Psychoanalysis
George Goldstein & Helen Golden (eds.)

Vol.41
THE HERO IN THE MIRROR:
From Fear to Fortitude
Sue Grand

Vol.40
THE ANALYST IN THE INNER CITY, SECOND EDITION:
Race, Class, and Culture through a Psychoanalytic Lens
Neil Altman

Vol.39
DARE TO BE HUMAN:
A Contemporary Psychoanalytic Journey
Michael Shoshani Rosenbaum

Vol.38
REPAIR OF THE SOUL:
Metaphors of Transformation in Jewish Mysticism and Psychoanalysis
Karen E. Starr

Vol.37
ADOLESCENT IDENTITIES:
A Collection of Readings
Deborah Browning (ed.)

Vol.36
BODIES IN TREATMENT:
The Unspoken Dimension
Frances Sommer Anderson (ed.)

Vol.35
COMPARATIVE-INTEGRATIVE PSYCHOANALYSIS:
A Relational Perspective for the Discipline's Second Century
Brent Willock

Vol.34
RELATIONAL PSYCHOANALYSIS, VOL. III:
New Voices
Melanie Suchet, Adrienne Harris, & Lewis Aron (eds.)

Vol.33
CREATING BODIES:
Eating Disorders as Self-Destructive Survival
Katie Gentile

Vol.32
GETTING FROM HERE TO THERE:
Analytic Love, Analytic Process
Sheldon Bach

Vol.31
UNCONSCIOUS FANTASIES AND THE RELATIONAL WORLD
Danielle Knafo & Kenneth Feiner

Vol.30
THE HEALER'S BENT:
Solitude and Dialogue in the Clinical Encounter