Ghosts in the Consulting Room

<p><em>Ghosts in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanalysis</em> is the first of two volumes that delves into the overwhelming often unmetabolizable feelings related to mourning. The book uses clinical examples of people living in a state of liminality or ongoing melancholia. The authors reflect on the challenges of learning to move forward and embrace life over time while acknowledging witnessing and working through the emotional scars of the past.</p><p>Bringing together a collection of clinical and theoretical papers <i>Ghosts in the Consulting Room </i>features accounts of the unpredictable effects of trauma that emerge within clinical work often unexpectedly in ways that surprise both patient and therapist. In the book distinguished psychoanalysts examine how to work with a variety of ‘ghosts’ as they manifest in transference and countertransference in work with children and adults in institutional settings and even in the very founders and foundations of the field of psychoanalysis itself. They explore the dilemma of how to process loss when it is unspeakable and unknowable often manifesting in silence or gaps in knowledge and living in strange relations to time and space.</p><p>This book will be of interest to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts as well as social workers family therapists psychologists and psychiatrists. It will appeal to those specializing in bereavement and trauma and on a broader level to sociologists and historians interested in understanding means of coping with loss and grief on both an individual and larger scale basis. </p>