Guided Enactments in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

Sebastiano Santostefano is retired associate professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

• ContentsChapter 1: A Matrix of Cognitive, Behavioral and Environmental Processes That Enable a Patient to Function Adequately and Develop a Working Alliance with a Therapist: A Path to the Pathway of ChangeChapter 2: Studies Investigating Dialectical Relations among Embodied Meanings, Cognitive-Emotional Regulators, Instrumental-Expressive Behaviors and EnvironmentsChapter 3: Clinical Illustrations of Relational-Psychotherapy: Revising Rigid Cognitive- Emotional Orientations and Instrumental-Expressive Behaviors with EnactmentsChapter 4: A Psychoanalytic-Relational Model of Embodied Techniques to Connect a Patient’s I-Self and Me-Self: The Path to the Pathway of Reflexivity

Dr. Santostefano’s latest work, Guided Enactments in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, like his earlier clinical texts, is a must-read book for any clinician. This is a well-integrated work that incorporates theory, empirical research, and therapeutic case studies, to make a strong evidence-based case for the central importance of bodily experiences (“enactments”), throughout the life span, as they constitute the meaning-emotions that the person experiences and expresses. Working within a relational psychoanalytic framework, Santostefano expands this approach by weaving together contributions from developmental psychology, cognitive-emotional psychology, behavioral psychology and environmental psychology. The text flows naturally to its culminating set of concrete steps for when and how the therapist can best carry out Santostefano’s broad proposal that the ‘the therapist design, initiate and interact with the patient in enactments.’