Destructiveness, Intersubjectivity and Trauma

Werner Bohleber, Dr Phil, is psychoanalyst in private practice in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He is a training and supervising analyst, and a former President of the German Psychoanalytical Association (DPV).

• Foreword , Introduction , The Intersubjective Paradigm in Psychoanalysis and Late Modernity , Intersubjectivity without a subject? Intersubjective theories and the Other , From surgeon to team-player: the transformation of guiding metaphors for the analytic relationship within clinical theory , Psychoanalytic theories of personality, adolescence, and the problem of identity in late modernity , Trauma, Memory, and Historical Context , The development of trauma theory in psychoanalysis , Remembrance, trauma, and collective memory: the battle for memory in psychoanalysis , Traumatic memories, dissociative states, and reconstruction , Psychoanalysis of Ideological Destructivity , Purity, unity, violence: unconscious determinants of anti-Semitism in Germany , Ideality and destructiveness: towards a psychodynamics of fundamentalist terrorist violence

'Bohleber's thoroughly theoretically grounded psychoanalytic approach gives one hope for the future of the discipline. The book is highly intelligent, makes psychoanalysis relevant to some of the deepest intellectual quandaries of our generation including the nature of the bipersonal field, the impact of interpersonal violence on human development, the ideologies that permit and possibly fuel such violence and the cultural forces that are unconsciously at work making all of us potential perpetrators as well as victims. Bohleber's book is a gem. It is the product of one of the most creative psychoanalytic minds of our generation. It purposefully avoids the extreme, is rooted in a balanced portrayal that eschews rhetoric or other attempts at short-circuiting serious balanced enquiry. It stands as a testament to the values within psychoanalysis that it celebrates, to resist idealisation and the destructiveness which it skirts.'- Peter Fonagy PhD FBA, Freud Memorial Professor of Psychoanalysis, Head of the Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, Chief Executive, The Anna Freud Centre, London