Moments of Uncertainty in Therapeutic Practice

Robert Waska conducts a full-time private psychoanalytic practice for individuals and couples in San Francisco and Marin County, California. In addition, he has taught classes and supervised therapists in the Bay Area and has presented papers in the United States and internationally. Dr. Waska is the author of ten textbooks on psychoanalytic theory and technique and is a contributing author for two psychology texts. He has also published more than ninety articles in professional journals and serves on the review committee for several journal and book publishers. Dr. Waska's work focuses on contemporary psychoanalytic topics, including projective identification, loss, borderline and psychotic states, the practical realities of psychoanalytic practice in the modern world, and the establishment of analytic contact with difficult and hard-to-reach patients. He emphasizes the moment-to-moment understanding of transference and phantasy as the vehicle for gradual integration and mastery of unconscious conflict between the self and the other.

• Acknowledgments Preface Introduction Section 1. Interpretive Acting Out 1. Containing, Translating, and Interpretive Acting Out: The Quest for Therapeutic Balance 2. Slippery When Wet: The Imperfect Art of Interpretation 3. Interpretive Acting Out: Unavoidable and Sometimes Useful 4. Enactments, Interactions, and Interpretations Section 2. Difficult and Jagged: Imperfect Clinical Situations 5. Kleinian Couple's Treatment: A Complicated Case 6. Failures, Successes, and Question Marks Section 3. The Emotional Foxhole 7. Different Ways of Controlling the Object 8. Taming, Restoring, and Rebuilding, or Sealing off, Burying, and Eliminating the Object: Two Ways of Controlling the Other 9. Two Varieties of Psychic Retreat: The Struggle with Combined Paranoid and Depressive Conflicts 10. Trapped in an Emotional Foxhole: Coping with Paranoid and Depressive Conflicts Discussion Bibliography Index

Robert Waska augments plentiful clinical material by detailing his process as he considers potential interventions. In a move that is all too rare among psychoanalytic writers, he includes even his interpretive failures, supplementing them with retrospective commentary that both elucidates and provides alternative formulations. Even seasoned clinicians will benefit from a volume that merits a place high on student reading lists. -- Nancy Vanderheide, Psy.D., president of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis