Withdrawal, Silence, Loneliness

Keynote

This informative and therapeutically useful work presents a guide to the schizoid process and offers thoughtful ideas of how to engage a client’s sense of self.

Key Features & Highlights

• With contributions from Silvia Allari, Leigh Bettles, Dan Eastop, Richard G. Erskine, Amaia Mauriz Etxabe, Linda Finley, Ray Little,

Lynn Martin, Marye O’Riely-Knapp, Eugenio Peiro Orozco.

• This is an essential book for all psychotherapists to widen their understanding of therapeutic practice.

• Clinical vignettes provide colour and clarity to the insightful guidance provided.

Over more than fifty years of practice, Richard G. Erskine has integrated diverse schools of psychoanalytic thought with his client-centred background to form his relationally focused, integrative psychotherapy. Alongside eight esteemed colleagues, he presents an authoritative guide on the schizoid process and on working with those clients with a fragmented sense of self who struggle with internal criticism, shame, and relational withdrawal.

Part I introduces the schizoid process and the concepts and therapeutic interventions required, helpfully illustrated through relevant vignettes that retain the subjective experience of therapist and client. Part II, the heart of the book, contains a longitudinal case study of Allan, focused on the narrative of the psychotherapy sessions interwoven with several salient concepts. Part III explores the client’s perspective, with one chapter written by a client to provide her views on her internal experience of psychotherapy. The final part contains a chapter on the five-year psychotherapeutic journey of a client, Louise, demonstrating how the theory of the schizoid process is put into therapeutic practice. Psychotherapists will find this book invaluable in widening their understanding of therapeutic practice.