Comparative-Integrative Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective for the Discipline's Second Century

Finalist for the 2007 Goethe Award for Psychoanalytic Scholarship!

This exceptionally practical and insightful new text explores the emerging field of comparative-integrative psychoanalysis. It provides an invaluable framework for approaching the currently fractious state of the psychoanalytic discipline, divided as it is into diverse schools of thought, presenting many conceptual challenges. Moving beyond the usual borders of psychoanalysis, Willock usefully draws on insights from neighboring disciplines to shed additional light on the core issue.

Comparative-Integrative Psychoanalysis is divided into two sections for organizational clarity. Part I is an intriguing investigation into the nature of thought and its intrinsic problems. It convincingly builds a case for the need, after a century of disciplinary development, to move beyond delineated schools, and proposes a method for achieving this goal. The succeeding section elaborates this desideratum in detail, exploring its implications with respect to theory, organizations, practice, and pedagogy. This second portion of the volume is most applicable to everyday concerns with improving work in the field, be it in the consulting room, classroom, or in and between various psychoanalytic organizations.