Linking general issues of privacy to the intimate details of psychotherapeutic encounter, this text should serve as a basic guide to a wide range of professionals, including lawyers, social scientists, philosophers and of course, psychotherapists, therapy patients, policy makers and the wider public will find it instructive to know more about the special protected conditions under which one can better come to know thyself.

-The question whether God is a subject for psychoanalysis is something that must be tackled at the very outset of our enterprise. However as we pay attention to it, the question reveals itself to be the product of a tension that exists between those who believe in the existence of God and those who do not. Sigmund Freud, by the very act of making God a subject of metapsychological deconstruction, took ... a resolutely atheistic position...the Illusion monograph is a literary battlefield where -Freud, the Atheist- is involved in a bloody combat with -Freud, the Believer- His pupils and...

Freud's -Beyond the Pleasure Principle- constitutes a major landmark and a real turning point in the evolution of psychoanalytic theory. Pushing aside the primacy of the tension-discharge-gratification model of mental dynamics, this work introduced the notion of a daemonic force within all human beings that slowly but insistently seeks psychic inactivity, inertia, and death. Diverse and rich connotations of the proposal are elucidated in this book. Other consequences of Freud's 1920 paper--namely, the marginalization of ego instincts, the introduction of Freud's second dream theory, and the...

Ever since Freud proposed that certain ideas can be permitted to become conscious only in their inverted and negative forms, interest has grown into the entire realm of the presence of absence, so to speak. Or, perhaps, it is better to term such mental contents as the presence in the form of absence. These two ways of conceptualizing Freud's negation have led to a panoploy of ideas that include negative hallucination, psychic holes, negative narcissism, selfishly motivated erasure of the Other, and the so-called -work of the negative-.

This volume, edited by Salman Akhtar and Mary...

Hope is the most reliable sustainer of life. It offers the promise of something good in the future, contributes to resilience, and keeps one going. However, there are circumstances when hope dries up. This book maps out this dark terrain of hopelessness. While it allows for the fact that a modicum of hopelessness might help in reducing infantile omnipotence and curtailing fixation on unrealistic goals, its focus is upon severe and clinically significant shades of hopelessness. The book opens with a broad overview of the nature, developmental origins, and technical implications of hope and...

-Lo inconsciente- es uno de los ensayos mas importantes y conocidos de Freud sobre metapsicologia. Escrito en 1915, contiene y describe los conceptos basicos de lo que se conoce como el modelo topografico de la mente de Freud. Salman Akhtar y Mary Kay O'Neil han recogido aqui una serie de ensayos escritos por analistas muy distinguidos que se acercan a este texto de Freud y lo comentan a la luz del psicoanalisis contemporaneo y desde diferentes puntos de vista, incluidos estudios recientes en neurofisiologia y etologia, lo que actualizara a los lectores sobre uno de los conceptos nucleares de...