Seeing and Being Seen: Emerging from a Psychic Retreat

Seeing and Being Seen: Emerging from a Psychic Retreat examines the themes that surface when considering clinical situations where patients feel stuck and where a failure to develop impedes the progress of analysis.

This book analyses the anxieties and challenges confronted by patients as they begin to emerge from the protection of psychic retreats. Divided into three parts, areas of discussion include:

• embarrassment, shame, and humiliation
• helplessness, power, and dominance
• mourning, melancholia, and the repetition compulsion.

As well as offering fresh ideas, Steiner bases his creative and integrative efforts on previous contributions by psychoanalysts including Freud, Klein, Rosenfeld, and Bion. As such, this book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, clinical psychotherapists, and all those with an interest in the psychoanalytic field.

John Steiner is a training analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society and works in private practice as a psychoanalyst. He is the author of several psychoanalytic papers and a book entitled Psychic Retreats (Routledge, 1993).