Hatred, Emptiness, and Hope

"Hatred, Emptiness, and Hope offers an updated vision of psychoanalytic object relations theory, revealing its application to transference focused psychotherapy (TFP), a treatment approach derived from and related to psychoanalysis. With empirical studies carried out by the Personality Disorders Institute at Weill Cornell as a basis, this volume expands the applications of TFP, illustrating it at work in scenarios that include severe personality disorders, disturbances in sexuality and love relations of narcissistic personalities, inpatient hospital treatment, and group settings. It also looks at the implications of new developments in neurobiology on psychoanalytic object relations theory. Readers will benefit from a discussion of the practice of TFP itself, with chapters that tackle the supervision of psychoanalysis, challenges for the future of psychoanalysis, and innovations that can serve to strengthen its role as a profession, a treatment approach, and a social organization within mental health sciences. It focuses on the analysis of particular clinical features of personality pathologies and describes the consideration of contemporary psychoanalytic object relations theory as a general theoretical frame of treatment that permits to conceptualize both normal personality functioning and the very nature of personality disorders. This volume also includes my recent efforts to contribute to the understanding of the relationship between neurobiological dispositions and their interaction with psychodynamic developments, again, both in normality and psychopathology. Finally, this volume explores the application of object relations theory to group processes, love relations, and therapists' training"--