In 1932 Einstein asked Freud, ‘Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?’ Freud answered that war is inevitable because humans have an instinct to self-destroy, a death instinct which we must externalize to survive. But nearly four decades of study of aggression reveal that rather than being an inborn drive, destructiveness is generated in us by experiences of excessive psychic pain. In War is Not Inevitable: On the Psychology of War and Aggression, Henri Parens argues...

Taming Aggression in Your Child: How to Avoid Raising Bullies, Delinquents, or Trouble-Makers is a guide to preventing children from developing aggressive behaviors from birth through adolescence. Hostile destructive kids become hostile destructive adults and often create serious problems for society, and Dr. Henri Parens argues that effective parenting can help prevent aggressive behaviors like bullying, delinquency, and even criminal behavior from developing.Parens explains to ca...

Hostile, destructive kids become hostile destructive adults and create serious problems for society. Handling Children's Aggression Constructively: Toward Taming Human Destructiveness shows how to prevent the development of disturbed aggressive behaviors in children, giving caregivers and educators the tools they need to handle problems in the making so they won't become more difficult and costly problems to deal with later on. Unlike the fine books previously published on how to ...

In Growing Up: Revisiting Child Development Theories and their Application to Patients of All Ages, editors Henri Parens and Salman Akhtar present a collection that draws on over fifty years of professional experience in child development. Contributors to this collection touch on psychoanalytic conceptualizations of child development, separation-individuation theory, personal clinical experiences, the effects of trauma and neurodevelopmental disorders in the mother-child relationship, and ...

From childhood onwards, humans use their environment’s responses to construct models or schemata to link feelings and impulses with actions and effects. If the environment during those formative years is unreliable, frustrating, or violating, the construction of those internal models can be disrupted and create a disjointed perception of the world, where violence is the only way to feel strong or good about oneself. Before and After Violence explores the complex network of experiences and ...

Established psychoanalytic/psychodynamic researchers and theorists bring the exploration of prejudice to a new level by examining how psychoanalysis might elucidate strategies that will eliminate prejudice.

Across the lifespan we may experience moments of sublime intimacy, suffocating closeness, comfortable solitude, and intolerable distance or closeness. In Interpersonal Boundaries: Variations and Violations Salman Akhtar and the other contributors demonstrate how boundaries, by delineating and containing the self, secure one's conscious and unconscious experience of entity and of self-governance.Interpersonal Boundaries reveals the complexities of the self and its ...

This volume addresses the critical psychoanalytic issue of effective listening. While this issue has been discussed widely in the literature, most often the discussions are from the standpoint of technique. Listening to Others is among the first texts to consider the listening process from the so-called 'two-person' perspective-i.e., that which is aligned with intersubjective, interpersonal, and relational theories. The contributors to this volume all are well-known experts in con...

What constitutes a lie? What are the different types of lies? Why do people lie? Is dishonesty ubiquitous in human experience? And what should be done with individuals who seek pschotherapeutic help and yet can not reveal important aspects of their lives and even fabricate histories, associations, and dreams? Such questions form the backbone of this exceptional book. Starting with the emergence of the capacity to lie in childhood and the formative influence of the family in children's mora...

Death is a much avoided topic. Literature on mourning exists, but it focuses chiefly upon the death of others. The inevitable psychic impact of one's own mortality is not optimally covered either in this literature on mourning or elsewhere in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. The Wound of Mortality brings together contributions from distinguished psychoanalysts to fill this gap by addressing the issue of death in a comprehensive manner. Among questions the contributors raise and seek...

In this tribute to Selma Kramer, eminent child analyst and colleague and close friend of the late Margaret Mahler, senior analysts explore the continuing relevance of Mahler's separation-individuation theory to developmental and clinical issues. Editors Salman Akhtar and Henri Parens have grouped the original contributions to Beyond the Symbiotic Orbit into sections that reevaluate Mahler's theory.Section I is a timely reassessment of Mahler's working model from the standp...

How do individuals cope constructively with significant trauma? How do they recover from it? What factors seem most codetermining of coping with and recovering from trauma? Can these be not only identified but also influenced by our interventions? Addressing these questions-questions about human beings' capacity for resilience-is the prime challenge taken up in this book by an assortment of international psychoanalytic, attachment, and biological mental health theorists and clinicians. Whi...