1st Edition
Ordinary People and Extra-ordinary Protections A Post-Kleinian Approach to the Treatment of Primitive Mental States
Many people come to analysis appearing quite 'ordinary' on the surface. However, once below that surface, we often come into contact with something quite unexpected: 'extra-ordinary protections' created to keep at bay any awareness of deeply traumatic happenings occurring at some point in life.
Judith Mitrani investigates the development and the function of these protections, allowing the reader to witness the evolution of the process of transformation, wherein defensiveness steadily mutates into communication.
She lucidly and artfully weaves detailed clinical with a variety of analytic concepts, and her original notions - including 'unmentalized experience' and its expression in enactments; 'adhesive pseudo-object relations' and the way in which this contracts and compares with normal and narcissistic object relations - provide valuable tools for understanding the infantile transference/countertransference and for the refinement of our technique with primitive mental states.
Ordinary People and Extra-Ordinary Protections will prove stimulating and accessible in its style and substance to a broad analytic readership, from the serious student of psychoanalysis to the most seasoned professional.
Biography
Judith L. Mitrani is a Training and Supervising analyst at both The Psychoanalytic Center of California and the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies. She is author of A Framework for the Imaginery: Clinical Explorations in Primitive States of Being and the co-editor (with Dr. Theodore Mitrani) of the book Encounters with Autisitic States: A Memorial Tribute to Frances Tustin.
'Judith Mitrani's latest work beautifully illuminates some incompletely explored areas of psychoanalytic thinking... Throughout this work we become impressed with the presence of a versatile and innovative observer, thinker, clinician, and integrator with an unusual range of knowledge. Dr Mitrani's is a new, valuable, and most welcome voice in psychoanalysis.' - James S. Grotstein, North American Vice President, International Psychoanalytical Association
'Her clinical approach is to search for the earliest trauma - postulated around containment and intrauterine and skin-to-skin organization of experience - and she will link them to the immediacy of intense clinical (that is, transferential and countertransferential) states with a conceptual language that is commensurate to that suffering. And here Mitrani doesn't flinch; she takes on the "cascading breakdown- in both analyst
and analysand .. in the face of extreme emotional turbulence".' - Alfred Margulies, JAPA vol 50 No 3, 2002'The overriding quality of this book is its transparency, its lucid quality of discourse about the author's work, and the clear presentation of the clinical process she sets going. This leaves the reader always knowing exactly where he/she is with the author's thinking, and in a position to feel oneself there in the room with the analyst and her patients.' - R.D. Hinshelwood, IJPA 2002
Mitrani offers us an extraordinary view of an intensely gifted clinician, working at the very edge of what can be felt and thought analytically, As such, this book is remarkable - George Pidgeon, from The Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy, (Vol 7, No 3) Autumn 2007
