Our intuition tells us that we, our conscious selves, cause our own voluntary acts. Yet scientists have long questioned this; Thomas Huxley, for example, in 1874 compared mental events to a steam whistle that contributes nothing to the work of a locomotive. New experimental evidence (most notable, work by Benjamin Libet and Daniel Wegner) has brought the causal status of human behavior back to the forefront of intellectual discussion. This multidisciplinary collection advances the debate, approaching the question from a variety of perspectives. The contributors begin by examining recent research in neuroscience that suggests that consciousness does not cause behavior, offering the outline of an empirically based model that shows how the brain causes behavior and where consciousness might fit in. Other contributors address the philosophical presuppositions that may have informed the empirical studies, raising questions about what can be legitimately concluded about the existence of free will from Libet's and Wegner's experimental results. Others examine how recent psychological and neuroscientific research might affect legal, social, and moral judgments of responsibility and blame - in situations including a provocative Clockwork Orange-like scenario of behavior correction.

While paediatric healthcare professionals view play as the treatment tool of choice for children under school age, the theory and practice underpinning play-based therapeutic approaches often remain less clear to individual practitioners. Paediatric intervention approaches are increasingly being questioned, and individual practitioners constantly asked to provide evidence-based practice. In response, a more coherent understanding and fresh discussion on children's play and utilisation of play for therapeutic purposes is needed, especially as societal expectations and lifestyles change."Play as Therapy" provides background theory and practical applications of original research on play assessment and interventions used in therapy. The book offers a solid foundation for identifying and assessing play dysfunction, understanding play in different cultural contexts and considerations when intervening with play. The practical approach is underpinned by theory, research and case vignettes to explain how to utilise play as therapy with challenging children.

This book is crammed with practical tips, real life stories and new thinking. So often research results arrive from highly specialised work – this book attempts to synthesise a range of new learning from a number of fields and present a hopeful view of the condition - there are many entry points to use to create the possibility of forward motion and development. Touching lightly on some specific and recurring problems, the book unpicks our current understanding of the condition and describes in detail how to use coaching to empower and enable rather than to control and direct. Teachers, parents and other professionals working with this population will find the book useful and interesting (and amusing!), as will people with Asperger’s and those people who come into contact with the undiagnosed or unnoticed “Aspies“ – health, education and social service professionals especially, but also coaches, therapists and complementary health practitioners.

This book gathers the lectures of the Post-Graduate Course entitled The Graph of Desire and the Psychoanalytic Clinic, held in 1993 within the framework of the Updating Program on Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Post-Graduate Secretary, Faculty of Psychology, University of Buenos Aires). Although the subject of the course was the graph of desire and its articulation with the psychoanalytical practice, the reader will ?nd here that Lacan’s article The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious has been intensively looked over, being paraphrased and quoted in almost every class of the course. Considering that the Spanish translation has some problems, I have translated myself certain terms and paragraphs from the original French version, in order to try to understand what Lacan affirms. The recordings of the course lectures constitute the basis for this book; they have been barely modi?ed, for their colloquial style will not interfere with the reading. I would like to thank all those who collaborated, in different ways, with this book, which aims at reviving and going into Jacques Lacan’s teaching in depth. This gratitude is particularly addressed to the students who made it possible to maintain a permanent interest and enthusiasm during the coursework.

Using the Kleinian concept of projective-identification, with special reference to intrusive identification with internal objects, this work examines claustrophobic phenomena and its relations to the treatment of borderline and adolescent patients.

Chronic childhood trauma, such as prolonged abuse or family violence, can severely disrupt a person's development, basic sense of self, and later relationships. Adults with this type of history often come to therapy with complex symptoms that go beyond existing criteria for PTSD. This important book brings together prominent authorities to present the latest thinking on complex traumatic stress disorders and provide practical guidelines for conceptualization and treatment. Evidence-based assessment procedures are detailed, and innovative individual, couple, family, and group therapies are described and illustrated with case vignettes and session transcripts.

While recent years have seen a vast increase in the literature on adult trauma, interest in childhood trauma has only recently started to gain momentum, encouraging new research and evidence-based interventions. Here the editors have brought together an international list of contributors to look at both innovative and established treatments of trauma in a range of contexts, and provide up-to-date coverage of what is on offer in prevention, assessment, treatment and research.

This fully revised second edition of Schizophrenia: The Positive Perspective uses biographical sketches and essays to discuss schizophrenia and related conditions, providing advice on methods of coping, routes to growth, recovery and well being, and how schizophrenia can be viewed in a positive light. It also explores the insights of R. D. Laing and discusses how they can be applied to contemporary ideas and research.

Many societal and cultural changes have taken place over the past several decades, almost all of which have had a significant effect on the mental health professions. Clinicians find themselves encountering clients from highly diverse backgrounds more and more often, increasing the need for a knowledge of cross-cultural competencies. Ellis and Carlson have brought together some of the leaders in the field of multicultural counseling to create a text for mental health professionals that not only addresses diversity but also emphasizes the counselor’s role as an advocate of social justice. The theoretical foundation for this book rests on research into diversity, spirituality, religion, and color-specific issues. Each chapter addresses the unique needs and relevant issues in working with a specific population, such as women, men, African Americans, Asian Americans, Spanish-speaking clients, North America’s indigenous peoples, members of the LGBT community, new citizens, and the poor, underserved, and underrepresented. Issues that enter into the counselor-patient relationship are discussed in detail for all of these groups, with the hope that this will lead to a greater understanding and sensitivity on the part of the counselor for their patients. This is an important and timely book for both counselors-in-training and those already established as professionals in today’s highly diverse and constantly-changing society.

On Soul and Earth offers an original perspective on the relationship between the environment and the human psyche. Physical spaces contribute to the building of identity through personal experience and memory. Places evoke emotions and carry their own special meanings. Elena Liotta and her contributors also explore the neglected topics of migration and travel. The author has extensive clinical experience of working with patients from a wide variety of national and cultural backgrounds. Globalization is present in the clinical office as well as in the wider world and the transformations presently being wrought in the areas of cultural and national identity also impact on clinical work. This book will be of interest to Jungian analysts as well as psychotherapists and mental health professionals, especially those who are addressing transcultural and multicultural issues including voluntary or enforced migration. It will also appeal to urban planners, architects and those interested in environmental issues.

Work Discussion brings together a combination of close observation of, and personal and interpersonal responses to, the minutiae of the work setting and its dynamics, both internal and external. Such a model depends on the development of hard-won capacities, and the descriptions offered here, both by students and by experienced staff, fully demonstrate the immense relevance of the approach, both to training and to a wide variety of work situations. The book first outlines the process of the method itself, followed by descriptions of a range of settings, both in Britain and abroad, in which that method has been successfully applied. The contributors draw on experiences across age, culture, and race in, for example, schools, hospitals, residential homes, in a prison, and in a refugee community. The final chapter explores the implications of work discussion for research and policy-making more generally. Many of the situations narrated here are extreme, whether in terms of disturbance or of vulnerability, but these pages offer often moving insights into how effective the method can be and how truly impressive a developmental model it provides.

When neurology researcher James Austin began Zen training, he found that his medical education was inadequate. During the past three decades, he has been at the cutting edge of both Zen and neuroscience, constantly discovering new examples of how these two large fields each illuminate the other. Now, in "Selfless Insight", Austin arrives at a fresh synthesis, one that invokes the latest brain research to explain the basis for meditative states and clarifies what Zen awakening implies for our understanding of consciousness. Austin, author of the widely read "Zen and the Brain", reminds us why Zen meditation is not only mindfully attentive but evolves to become increasingly selfless and intuitive. Meditators are gradually learning how to replace overemotionality with calm, clear objective comprehension. In this new book, Austin discusses how meditation trains our attention, reprogramming it toward subtle forms of awareness that are more openly mindful. He explains how our maladaptive notions of self are rooted in interactive brain functions. And he describes how, after the extraordinary, deep states of kensho-satori strike off the roots of the self, a flash of transforming insight-wisdom leads toward ways of living more harmoniously and selflessly. "Selfless Insight" is the capstone to Austin's journey both as a creative neuroscientist and as a Zen practitioner. His quest has spanned an era of unprecedented progress in brain research and has helped define the exciting new field of contemplative neuroscience.

Unbearable Affect is that rarest of literary gems, a work of genuine and profound scientific merit that also has a deeply moving story to tell. It traces the progress of a fictional young psychiatrist, Tony Potter, as he immerses himself in the lives and psyches of patients who suffer from the worst kinds of mental torment. Dr. Potter‘s clinical encounters demonstrate that affect lies at the centre of psychosis and must, therefore, be the focus of any meaningful course of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy.In this cohesive, dramatic, and highly readable book, Dr. Garfield establishes a roadmap for the diagnosis and psychotherapeutic treatment of psychotic disorders based on finding, understanding and reordering of unbearable affect. He provides concrete clinical advice, vivid examples, and crisp jargon-free descriptions of theoretical concepts and clinical techniques. Most of all, he demonstrates that it is possible for psychotic patients to take control of their conditions, rebuild family relationships, and establish themselves in the viable productive lives that they have long despaired of achieving.

This important new work showcases the very latest in the theory, research and practice of ACT across a range of clinical applications, including eating disorders, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, PTSD and substance abuse, with contributions from leading ACT practitioners including co-founders Kirk Strosahl, Kelly Wilson and Rob Zettle.

This book tracks a particular understanding of self, philosophically, from research evidence and in its implications for psychotherapy. At each step, the author includes first the theory he is working from, then the clinical implications of the theory, followed by some links to the philosophical outlook inherent in the theory, and finally a more extended case example. …the author takes the view that the continuing self is partly an illusion, partly a construct, and that we in fact have to work to stay the same in the face of all the different possibilities the world offers us. He believes that we do this for two reasons. First of all, continuity allows deeper contact: friendships, loving relationships with partners and families. Secondly, and balancing this, the predictable is less anxiety-producing, and that we avoid this existential anxiety by acting in a stereotyped way and avoiding some of the depths of contact. He argues that this dual nature of continuing self, in one context deepening contact and in another context avoiding contact, has an important place in the understanding of psychotherapy.

This book aims to expand the Barangers' oeuvre to the English language and, consequently, to a broader spectrum of readers. These contributions represent a pioneering and anticipatory work of great interest to the psychoanalytical world. Their proposals concerning the concept of psychoanalytic field, "basic unconscious fantasy", bastion and insight, address the whole question of the analytic situation and anticipate current debates.'

The Future of an Illusion reveals Freud's reflections about religion as well as his hope that in the future science will go beyond religion, and reason will replace faith in God. The discussion with an imaginary critic revealed his internal debate, mirroring the debate about this subject in the outside world. However, it also enlightens his way of thinking: deconstructing and constructing at the same time. This volume considers Freudian ideas and their implications today, while focusing on the contradictions and gaps in Freud's proposals. The question of the coexistence between religion and psychoanalysis, as well as the place of ideals, belief, illusion, and imagination - and, no less important, the benevolent and destructive aspects of religion - also come into play.

HOW TO MAKE IT ALL WORK provides an instantly useable tool kit for staying ahead of the game. David Allen shows us how to excel in dealing with our daily commitments, the unexpected, and the information overload that threatens to drown us. He addresses how to figure out where you are in life and what you need; How to be your own consultant and CEO of your life; moving from hope to trust in decision-making; when not to set goals; harnessing intuition, spontaneity, and serendipity; and why life is like business and business is like life. Throw out everything you know about productivity – How to Make It All Work will make life and work a fame you can win.