Going on Being in Challenging Times: Psychoanalytic Reflections

In this volume, we explore what it is to live through trauma while experiencing huge losses that threaten our well-being. The book demonstrates how clinicians can help patients regain meaning and purpose once again.

The authors in these chapters sensitively annotate their therapeutic journeys with their patients, all of whom grapple with extremely difficult emotional conditions. There is much that can be learned about going-on-being from psychoanalysts, who have always worked in the depth of the unconscious psychic dimension. The authors focus on the psychic processes, the core experiences, and the qualities of selfhood that help to move the human soul through despair on to hope and new beginnings. Rich clinical vignettes illustrate these ideas in a way that is sure to help clinicians and other readers face and work with their own and others’ places of pain and challenge.

We have all been shaken by the winds of unsettling social and political change over the past few years; hence this book will appeal to a wide audience. Psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, clinical social workers, counselors, students and others in the helping professions will find this book essential reading, as will members of the wider public who have experienced challenges in their own or their loved one’s ＂going-on-being＂.

Michelle Flax, Ph.D., is a Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst in private practice in Toronto, Canada. Supervising Psychoanalyst and Faculty, Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and Executive and Faculty at the Advanced Training in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program (ATPPP).

J. Gail White, Ph.D., is a Psychoanalyst in private practice in Toronto. Supervising Psychoanalyst and Faculty, Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Student Progress committee member of the Advanced Program in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (ATPPP).