Getting From Here to There

<p>It is clinical work with the most difficult patients - those with severe narcissistic sadomasochistic and borderline disorders - that poses the greatest challenge to the therapist's guiding assumptions about clinical process; indeed such work often leads therapists to question beliefs and expectations that formerly seemed self-evident. In <em>Getting From Here to There: Analytic Love Analytic Process</em> Sheldon Bach elaborates the holistic vision that guides him in work with just such patients. He dwells especially on the attentive presence through which the analyst effects a meeting with patients that invites the latter's trust in the analyst and in the therapeutic process. And he writes of love - of patient for analyst and of analyst for patient - that grows out of this mutual trust and sustains therapeutic process. For Bach analytic therapy aims at understanding the person as a mind-body unity that manifests particular states of consciousness.</p><p>This holistic vision of treatment sustains a flexible clinical orientation that enables the analyst to meet states of consciousness in order to bring them into a system of which the analyst forms a part. Bach thoughtfully explores the clinical issues that enter into this taxing process among them the establishment and maintenence of basic trust; the patient's or the therapist's presence in the other's mind; and the shifts in agency between patient and therapist. And he describes at length the frequently exhausting even demoralizing transference-countertransference struggles that enter into this type of analytic work.</p><p>Throughout Bach is guided by the conviction that work with extremely challenging patients promotes the psychological growth and increased self-knowledge of patient and analyst alike. And he is admirably clear that the mutual living through of such treatments nurtures a kind of love between patient and analyst.</p><p><em>Getting From Here to There</em> not only records the clinical lessons learned by an unusually gifted analyst; it also chronicles the movement of psychoanalysis itself from the dissection of love into component parts to a synthetic grasp of its vital role in psychoanalytically informed treatment.</p>