Cyclical Psychodynamics and the Contextual Self The Inner World, the Intimate World, and the World of Culture and Society Relational Perspectives Book Series

Cyclical Psychodynamics and the Contextual Self articulates in new ways the essential features and most recent extensions of Paul Wachtel's powerfully integrative theory of cyclical psychodynamics. Wachtel is widely regarded as the leading advocate for integrative thinking in personality theory and the theory and practice of psychotherapy. He is a contributor to cutting edge thought in the realm of relational psychoanalysis and to highlighting the ways in which the relational point of view provides especially fertile ground for integrating psychoanalytic insights with the ideas and methods of other theoretical and therapeutic orientations.

In this book, Wachtel extends his integration of psychoanalytic, cognitive-behavioral, systemic, and experiential viewpoints to examine closely the nature of the inner world of subjectivity, its relation to the transactional world of daily life experiences, and the impact on both the larger social and cultural forces that both shape and are shaped by individual experience. Here, he discusses in a uniquely comprehensive fashiong the subtleties of the clinical interaction, the findings of systematic research, and the role of social, economic, and historical forces in our lives. The chapters in this book help to transcend the tunnel vision that can lead therapists of different orientations to ignore the important discoveries and innovations from competing approaches.

Explicating the pervasive role of vicious circles and self-fulfilling prophecies in our lives, Cyclical Psychodynamics and the Contextual Self shows how deeply intertwined the subjective, the intersubjective, and the cultural realms are, and points to new pathways to therapeutic and social change. Both a theoretical tour de force and an immensely practical guide to clinical practice, this book will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and students of human behavior of all backgrounds and theoretical orientations.

Part I: Psychotherapy, Personality Dynamics, and the World of Intersubjectivity.Cyclical Psychodynamics: An Integrative, Relational Point of View. The Good News: To Mess up Your Life You Need Accomplices The Bad News: They Are Very Easy to Recruit. The "Inner" and "Outer" Worlds and Their Link Through Action. Attachment in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy: A Two-Person, Cyclical Psychodynamic Approach. The Surface and the Depths: Reexamining the Metaphor of Depth in Psychoanalytic Discourse. Repression, Dissociation, and Self-Acceptance: Reexamining the Idea of "Making the Unconscious Conscious". Active Intervention, Psychic Structure, and the Analysis of Transference.Beyond Eclecticism: Toward a More Clinically Seamless Integration in Therapeutic Practice. Thinking about Resistance: Affect, Cognition, and Corrective Emotional Experiences. Should Psychoanalytic Training Be Training to Be a Psychoanalyst? Epistemological Foundations of Psychoanalysis: Science, Hermeneutics, and the Vicious Circles of Adversarial Discourse. Part II: Race, Class, Greed, and the Social Construction of Desire. Psychoanalysis, Everyday Unhappiness, and the World of Cultural Constructions. Full Pockets, Empty Lives: Probing the Contemporary Culture of Greed. Greed as an Individual and Social Phenomenon. From Therapy to Social Justice: Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy, and Divisions of Race and Class. The Vicious Circles of Racism: A Cyclical Psychodynamic Perspective on Race and Race Relations.

Paul L. Wachtel is CUNY Distinguished Professor at City College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is Past President of the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration and is the winner of the 2010 Hans H. Strupp Memorial Award for Psychoanalytic Writing, Teaching, and Research, the 2012 Distinguished Psychologist Award by Division 29 of the APA (Psychotherapy), and the 2013 Scholarship and Research Award by Division 39 of the APA (Psychoanalysis).