Description
Ralph R. Greenson, the author of The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis, here presents a choice selection of his essays, spanning three to four decades. Explorations in Psychoanalysis reflects some of Dr. Greenson’s most abiding interests: emotions-their development and their aberrations-sexuality and gender identity, and problems of psychoanalytic technique.
Dr. Greenson, as is to be expected in one who has so well-deserved a reputation as a master clinician, invariably keeps the clinical situation in the forefront in developing his ideas-as in one of his own favorites, “The Mother Tongue and the Mother.” He possesses the rare talent of bringing the reader into his consulting room so that the distinction, for example, between transference and the “real” relationship of patient and analyst indeed becomes real. He writes with a disarming simplicity, under which lies a wealth of experience. He knows whereof he speaks when he calls psychoanalysis “that impossible profession” and one of his papers “The Origin and Fate of New Ideas in Psychoanalysis.” Nonetheless, a title of another essay that most aptly reflects its author is “On Enthusiasm.”
Reviews of his previous book suggest what the reader can expect from this one. From Contemporary Psychology: “This is a splendid book, unquestionably the best we have had on psychoanalytic technique and unlikely soon to be surpassed or superseded. No doubt it is hackneyed to say that a book represents the distillation of a lifetime’s experience and reflection, yet here one must say it, for this is precisely the sense we have in reading this book, that its authority grows out of a deep and hard-won knowledge.” And from the Archives of General Psychiatry: “Dr. Ralph R. Greenson is a superb therapist, a brilliant teacher, an entrancing extemporaneous lecturer and a charismatic personality . . . . There is no question that he has written the best book yet on psychoanalytic technique.”
A book that will be read with pleasure and profit by student and clinical practitoner alike, Explorations in Psychoanalysis is full of challenging ideas presented with enviable lucidity.
