Affect, Representation and Language

This book extends psychoanalytic theory and practice beyond neurosis to what formerly were the limits of analytic understanding, presenting and elaborating on the rationale and implications of the transformational dimension of psychoanalytic practice. This work sits at the crossroads of the thinking of Freud, Bion, Winnicott, Green and the Paris Psycho-Somatic School. It includes the thinking of other contemporary French psychoanalysts such as Laplanche, Donnet, L. Kahn and the Botellas, plus Alvarez, Scarfone, Ferro, Ogden, and more, re-examining Freud's epistemological bases and their implications for his theory of psychic functioning. The book follows Freud in elaborating on the radical implications of his 1937 Constructions paper that leads to and underlies the thoughts of Bion on intuition and Winnicott on the working through of the consequences of early pre-verbal environmental failure. In so doing, it makes a case for psychoanalysis as a powerful treatment for borderline, primitive narcissistic, post-traumatic and other character disorders and conditions - including perversions, addictions, psychosomatic, autistic and panic disorders. Offering readers a metapsychology that is both contemporary and clinically near, Affect, Representation and Language offering practitioners at all levels of analytic experience a way of understanding and treating contemporary patients.