Winner of the 2010 Goethe Award for Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Scholarship

This book builds a key clinical bridge between attachment theory and psychoanalysis, deploying Holmes' unique capacity to weld empirical evidence, psychoanalytic theory and consulting room experience into a coherent and convincing whole. Starting from the theory-practice gap in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, the book demonstrates how attachment theory can help practitioners better understand what they intuitively do in the consulting room, how this benefits clients, and informs evidence-based...

Use of the imagination is a key aspect of successful psychotherapeutic treatments. Psychotherapy helps clients get in touch with, awaken, and learn to trust their creative inner life, while therapists use their imaginations to mentalise the suffering other and to trace the unconscious stirrings evoked by the intimacy of the consulting room.

Working from this premise, in The Therapeutic Imagination Jeremy Holmes argues unashamedly that literate therapists make better therapists. Drawing on psychoanalytic and literary traditions both classical and contemporary, Part I...

For three decades Jeremy Holmes has been a leading figure in psychodynamic psychiatry in the UK and across the world. He has played a central role in promoting the ideas of John Bowlby and in developing the clinical applications - psychiatric and psychotherapeutic - of Attachment Theory in working with adults. Drawing on both psychoanalytic and attachment ideas, Holmes has been able to encompass a truly biopsychosocial perspective. As a psychotherapist Holmes brings together psychodynamic, systemic and cognitive models, alert to vital differences, but also keenly sensitive to...