Change in Psychotherapy
A Unifying Paradigm
14 May 2010
Description
From an internationally acclaimed group of analysts, a selection of papers on the concept of change.
Since 1994, the Boston Change Process Study Group (BCPSG) has published articles on the most fundamental of therapeutic concepts: change. However, the BCPSG’s evolving interests and points of focus have been wide-ranging, if always thematically linked by a connection to change. With Change in Psychotherapy: A Unifying Paradigm, the evolution of the group’s thinking and work has been collected into a book for the first time.
The Group’s initial areas of research have since been recognized as central to psychotherapeutic thought. For example, the BCPSG has long focused on bringing insights from the study of infancy to bear on thinking about psychoanalytic processes. In its earliest work, the group looked to early development as a source of inspiration and knowledge, and as a possible way to illuminate change processes in psychotherapy. Today, developmental researchers and neuroscientists increasingly locate keys to psychological health and development in the earliest interactions between mother and infant. This book, which consists of significant papers by the BCPSG, traces the group’s contributions to psychoanalytic topics of note, including: the location of the implicit, the creation of meaning, the moment-by-moment clinical process, and the subjective experience of the therapist. The book also includes new introductions to selected chapters, which provide background on the original intent and reception of each article. Change in Psychotherapy presents the essential findings from an internationally acclaimed group of analysts in a single volume for the first time. In this, it is a truly groundbreaking work.
Reviews
"The authors’ contributions revolve around elaborating extant psychodynamic theory, and they do so in a well-written and accessible style that most clinicians would likely find useful and inspiring…Building sound and scientific theory must start somewhere, and this book’s efforts to provide clear working definitions about significant interpersonal processes seem like an excellent place to begin." — Timothy Anderson, Peter MacFarlane, PsycCRITIQUES
"The Boston Change Process Study Group has risen to the daunting task of encompassing a psychoanalysis that recognizes the contributions of clinical theory, unconscious motivations and conflict, relational interactions, developmental observations, caretaker—infant research, and adult treatment.....[T]hey have offered a theory of development and treatment that can inform every clinician in the conduct of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis." — Frank M. Lachmann, PhD, Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, New York
"The Boston Change Process Study Group is in the forefront of redefining how we think about how psychotherapy works. Bringing together psychoanalysis, developmental infant observation, and cognitive neuroscience, they define a set of core concepts that are experience-near and yet radical in their freshness and theoretical resonance. This volume defines and illustrates their ideas: the ‘now moment,’ ‘implicit relational knowing,’ ‘moments of meeting,’ ‘moving along,’ ‘recognition process,’ and others, all in the context of a very lucid exposition of their revised conception of psychodynamics, dynamic systems theory and indeed, of how adults and children make meaning with one another." — Stephen Seligman, DMH, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Infant-Parent Program, University of California, San Francisco
"This book is a must-read for psychodynamic clinicians, both beginning and advanced. In a field where little is truly novel, the Boston Change Process Study Group has been breaking new ground for the last fifteen years, creating a new paradigm for therapeutic action. This clearly written and compelling new volume is a chronicle of that journey. These authors assert that the therapeutic relationship itself, even in the absence of interpretation, is a sufficient condition for therapeutic change. Whether or not one is in agreement with this position, it is a point of view in contemporary psychoanalytic discourse that must be read, understood, and considered." — Glen O. Gabbard, MD, Brown Foundation Chair of Psychoanalysis and Professor of Psychiatry, Baylor College of Medicine
"Change in Psychotherapy adds significantly to the developmental perspective by conceptualizing the emergence of human relatedness from the groping attempts of mother and baby to find each other, then applying this description of intersubjectivity to the therapeutic dyad. In clear language and through excellent examples, the authors invite therapists to consider in a new light the momentary events that produce change in psychotherapy." — Joseph D. Lichtenberg, MD, Editor in chief, Psychoanalytic Inquiry
"Employing concepts derived from infant research and systems theory, the BCPSG proposes a new way of conceptualizing relational interaction. This is a radical departure from the Freudian understanding of what produces therapeutic change. Consequently, we can no longer think of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis as a ‘talking cure." — Arnold H. Model, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, and training and supervising analyst, Boston Psychoanalytic Institute