Crossing Borders - Integrating Differences

Alf Gerlach, MD, is an academically qualified sociologist who studied sociology and medicine at the Universities of Saarbruecken and Frankfurt am Main. He has worked at the Department for Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics in the University Hospital of Frankfurt, and is currently lecturer for psychoanalytic oriented psychotherapy in the program of the German-Chinese Academy for Psychotherapy. He is a member of the German Psychoanalytic Society and of the International Psychoanalytical Association and a training analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institutes in Mainz and Saarbruecken. He has also been chair of the German Society for Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy, Psychosomatics and Depth Psychology (DGPT), and a member of the China Committee of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Anne-Marie Schloesser is an academically qualified psychologist and a training and supervising psychoanalyst of the German Psychoanalytical Society (DPG) and the International Psychoanalytic Association. Her scientific publications include psychology in the medical field, supervision work in forensic psychiatry and on the Transitional Object.

• Preface -- Introduction -- Questioning Psychoanalytical Conceptualisation -- On transference interpretation as a resistance to free association -- Attachment and psychoanalysis: Is the concept of attachment drive really heretical? -- Combining individual and group therapy in an out-patient setting for patients with personality disorders—useful approach or invitation to acting out? -- Must one respect religiosity? -- Psychotherapy in Culture and Society: Problems of Migration, Interculturality -- Trauma, Migration and Creativity -- Culture-orientated psychoanalysis: On taking cultural background into account in the therapy of migrants -- Similar and yet different. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy with first and later generation immigrants in the Netherlands -- Teaching psychotherapy as a bridge in a multicultural environment -- Widening the Borders in Psychoanalytic Treatment -- Reflecting on borderline pathologies: The perverse core and its role in the crossroads between self-representation and confusion -- Aborted hope: Transference and countertransference implications of a narcissistic phantasy -- Experiencing loss and mourning in the countertransference -- Function of borders: Permeability and demarcation. The contact barrier in the psychoanalytic process -- The infra-verbal dimension of language in the transference: Its significance in the therapeutic process -- Is Psychoanalytic Research Possible? -- The profession and empirical research—sovereignty and integration -- Evidence-based psychoanalysis—a critical discussion of research into psychoanalytic therapy -- Psychosocial problems of patients with difficult to treat depression

'Crossing borders and integrating differences is an essentially psychoanalytic task like few others. This book allows the reader to take an adventurous trip at many levels, all true at the same time: from the migrants as people who were born elsewhere to the migrants understood as aspects of ourselves yet undiscovered and difficult to come in contact with. I strongly recommend this outstanding collection of articles to all therapists ready to migrate now and then towards new borders of psychoanalysis.'- Roberto Basile, Analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytical Association and co-author of The Analytic Field: A Clinical ConceptContributors:Elitsur Bernstein, Christopher Bollas, Peter Brundl, Michael B. Buchholz, Georgia Chalkia, Bernard Golse, Stephan Hau, Grigoris Maniadakis, Luisa Perrone, Jan Philipp Reemtsma, Maurizio Russo, Hermann Staats, Martin Teising, Sieglinde Eva Toemmel, Irini Vlahaki