Ordinary People and Extra-ordinary Protections

Judith L. Mitrani is a Training and Supervising analyst at both The Psychoanalytic Center of California and the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies. She is author of A Framework for the Imaginery: Clinical Explorations in Primitive States of Being and the co-editor (with Dr. Theodore Mitrani) of the book Encounters with Autisitic States: A Memorial Tribute to Frances Tustin.

• Grotstein, Foreword. Transference Interpretation and the Emergence of Infantile Dependency in Ordinary People. Extra-Ordinary Protections: The Evolution of the Theory of Adhesive Identification. Ordinary People and Extra-Ordinary Protections. The Flying Dutchman and the Search for the Containing Object. Chloe: From Pre-Conception to After Birth. Unbearable Ecstasy, Reverence and Awe and the Perpetuation of an Aesthetic Conflict. Never Before and Never Again. Changes of Mind: Working Things Through in the Countertransference. Concluding Thoughts.

'Judith Mitrani's latest work beautifully illuminates some incompletely explored areas of psychoanalytic thinking... Throughout this work we become impressed with the presence of a versatile and innovative observer, thinker, clinician, and integrator with an unusual range of knowledge. Dr Mitrani's is a new, valuable, and most welcome voice in psychoanalysis.' - James S. Grotstein, North American Vice President, International Psychoanalytical Association'Her clinical approach is to search for the earliest trauma - postulated around containment and intrauterine and skin-to-skin organization of experience - and she will link them to the immediacy of intense clinical (that is, transferential and countertransferential) states with a conceptual language that is commensurate to that suffering. And here Mitrani doesn't flinch; she takes on the "cascading breakdown- in both analystand analysand .. in the face of extreme emotional turbulence".' - Alfred Margulies, JAPA vol 50 No 3, 2002'The overriding quality of this book is its transparency, its lucid quality of discourse about the author's work, and the clear presentation of the clinical process she sets going. This leaves the reader always knowing exactly where he/she is with the author's thinking, and in a position to feel oneself there in the room with the analyst and her patients.' - R.D. Hinshelwood, IJPA 2002Mitrani offers us an extraordinary view of an intensely gifted clinician, working at the very edge of what can be felt and thought analytically, As such, this book is remarkable - George Pidgeon, from The Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy, (Vol 7, No 3) Autumn 2007