Needed Relationships and Psychoanalytic Healing

<p><em>Needed Relationships and Psychoanalytic Healing</em> is both a personal analytic <i>credo</i> and a multidimensional approach to thinking about clinical interaction. The book’s central theme is that of <i>analytic needed relationships</i>—the science and art of co-creating unique evolving relational experiences fitted to each patient’s implicit therapeutic aims and needs.</p><p>Steven Stern argues that while we need psychoanalytic theories to grow the receptors and processors necessary to sense understand and connect with our patients these often tend to frame the therapist’s participation in terms of theoretical and technical categories rather than offering a more holistic view of the relationship in all of its human complexity. Stern believes that a new set of higher order constructs is needed to counteract this tendency. In addition to his own concept of needed relationships he invokes principles from the work of renowned developmental researcher and theorist Louis Sander: especially his concept of<i> </i>relational<i> fittedness. </i>Stern draws on the work of Freud Bion Winnicott Kohut and a broad spectrum of contemporary psychoanalytic authors in fleshing out the therapeutic implications of Sander’s (and Stern’s own) vision. The result is a rich humane and accessible narrative.</p><p><i>Needed Relationships and Psychoanalytic Healing</i> offers diverse clinical examples in which you will find Stern engaging with each of his patients in idiomatic spontaneous ways as he attempts to contour interventions to the evolving analytic situation. This case material will inspire therapist-readers to feel freer to find their own creative voices and idioms of participation as they seek to meet each patient within the psychoanalytic space. The book is intended for psychoanalysts and psychodynamic therapists at all levels of experience including those in training.</p>