Various tributaries of psychoanalytic and developmental theory have flowed into our understanding of the role of early sensory and affective experiences in the construction of our personal worlds. This work traces how such primary experiences coalesce into patterns. Through pattern, Marilyn Charles holds, we approach elusive meanings through dimensions of shape, contour, and affective resonance. Such patterned understandings, in turn, become a mode of interchange through which we touch one another in ways that go beyond the overtly physical. Analytic patients, Charles finds, have often led...

An important task facing all clinicians, and especially challenging for younger, less experienced clinicians, is to come to know oneself sufficiently to be able to register the patient's experience in useful and progressively deeper ways. In an effort to aid younger clinicians in the daily struggle to "know thyself," Marilyn Charles turns to key ideas that have facilitated her own clinical work with difficult patients. Concepts such as "container" and "contained," transitional space, projective identification, and transference/countertransference are introduced not as academic ideas, but as...

Fragments of Trauma and the Social Production of Suffering: Trauma, History, and Memory offers a kaleidoscope of perspectives that highlight the problem of traumatic memory. Because trauma fragments memory, storytelling is impeded by what is unknowable and what is unspeakable. Each of the contributors tackles the problem of narrativizing memory that is constructed from fragments that have been passed along the generations. When trauma is cultural as well as personal, it becomes even more invisible, as each generation's attempts at coping push the pain further below the surface. Consequently,...

Transgenerational Trauma and the Aboriginal Preschool Child: Healing through Intervention approaches trauma from transgenerational perspectives that go back to the early colonization of Australia, and describes what that event has historically meant for the country's Aboriginal population and its culture. This history has continued to propagate traumatically across subsequent generations. This book reveals the work underway at Gunawirra, a group in Sydney founded to work against transgenerational trauma in families with children aged 0-5. The group then began working with projects in more...

Psychoanalysis offers many concepts that are extremely useful clinically but not always accessible in the original. In Psychoanalysis and Literature: The Stories We Live, Marilyn Charles pairs case vignettes with examples from literature to highlight the essential human struggles that play out in the consulting room. This pairing depathologizes those struggles and offers a conceptual framework that can help the clinician facilitate these journeys of discovery. Describing first how literature affords an opportunity for vicarious engagement with struggles endemic to the human condition, she...

This book provides a clear introduction to the main contemporary psychoanalytic theoretical perspectives.　 Psychoanalysis is often thought of as an obscure and outdated method, and yet, those familiar with it recognize the profound value of psychoanalytic theory and technique. Part of that obscurity may come from often impenetrable psychoanalytic language itself. The complexity of the subject matter has leant itself to a confusion of tongues and yet, at base, psychoanalysis remains an earnest attempt to make sense of and ease human distress.　

Introduction...

This book provides a clear introduction to the main contemporary psychoanalytic theoretical perspectives.　 Psychoanalysis is often thought of as an obscure and outdated method, and yet, those familiar with it recognize the profound value of psychoanalytic theory and technique. Part of that obscurity may come from often impenetrable psychoanalytic language itself. The complexity of the subject matter has leant itself to a confusion of tongues and yet, at base, psychoanalysis remains an earnest attempt to make sense of and ease human distress.　

Introduction...