When Hurt Remains

Asaf Rolef Ben-Shahar, PhD, is a relational psychotherapist from Israel, founder of two relational body psychotherapy programmes (in Israel and the UK), teaching and lecturing worldwide. His books include 'Anatomy of Therapy' and 'Touching the Relational Edge'. He is the Editor-in-Chief of 'The International Body Psychotherapy Journal', and an editor with 'Body Dance and Movement in Psychotherapy', 'Psychotherapy and Politics International' and 'Self and Society'. Rachel Shalit is an integrative and body-oriented psychotherapist, a board member of the Israel Association for Body-Psychotherapy, and a member of Psychosoma, the post-graduate Relational Body Psychotherapy School in Israel. Her previous career specialized in learning organizations (continuous improvement and methodologies). This passion is now oriented to the psychotherapy field.

• Foreword -- Introduction -- Beyond Binaries -- Introduction to Part I -- Challenging the success-failure polarity in therapeutic practice -- Enactment, acknowledgement, and the bearing of badness -- Life is no picnic -- Techniques: Holding on and Letting Go -- Introduction to Part II -- “Put Down the Duckie”: analytic vigour, rigour, and relinquishment -- Technique as therapeutic escape -- Old ladies, exhausted souls, and a large sack of healing herbs -- Enactments: When Biographies and Self-States Converge -- Introduction to Part III -- The fear of breakdown and the fear from breakthrough -- Failing with dignity -- A Failure with a capital F -- Affects on the Edge -- Introduction to Part IV -- Like a drop at the lip of a glass -- Daring anger and intimacy: clinical failure or success? -- Broader Perspectives -- Introduction to Part V -- An informal account of therapeutic outcomes in one practice of psychotherapy over a twenty year period -- We met in borrowed space -- Failures, challenges, and learning within the field of intercultural psychotherapy, supervision, and training -- Losing my religion? Psychotherapeutic practice as repetition compulsion of character rigidity

'Sometimes, more often than we think, and more regularly than we discuss with students or with each other, therapies end badly. It is difficult enough to face this when the therapy has been brief, but quite painful and problematic when the therapeutic relationship has gone on for some or many years. It is not that these failed endings mean that nothing good has been achieved over the years, but rather that some significant hopes were not fulfilled, or that personal injuries between patient and analyst could not be worked out, resolved or forgiven, or that one partner got burnt out and withdrew before the other. These are among the most painful experiences of a therapist's career and they are rarely acknowledged and discussed publicly or in the therapist's education. When Hurt Remains brings together leading therapists writing on a range of hurts, injuries, and failures, providing an important and wide-ranging contribution that will be of value to students, professionals, patients and the public.'- Lewis Aron, PhD, Director, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis'Near the end of his life, Andre Green wrote a book about cases he failed with. The present volume expands the subject of therapeutic failure, viewing it from many angles, colours, and tones. In effect, it expands the meaning of failure. There are failures that are profoundly tragic and the last word is heartbreak. Yet much failure is relative and can open as well as close doors, leading to unexpected possibilities of experience.'- Michael Eigen, PhD, author of Image, Sense, Infinities, and Everyday Life