Doris Brothers, Jon Sletvold, Psychoanalytic Explorations of Embodied Relational Knowing, Routledge, 2026
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Description
This book offers groundbreaking insights into relational theory, exploring the patient’s and the analyst’s longings to know, be known and not known in psychoanalytic relationships, and the embodied nature of the healing process.
Recognition of the patient’s unknowable uniqueness, which is not fully accessible by means of empathy, is shown to promote more ethical therapeutic practices. Although few psychoanalytic books have highlighted the work of the philosopher, Michel Foucault, Brothers and Sletvold find much that is highly relevant in his work. They also demonstrate the powerful influence of culture, history, politics and world events on the therapeutic encounter.
With an informed and compassionate perspective, this book is essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists regardless of their theoretical orientation.
Doris Brothers is a co-founder of the Training and Research in Intersubjective Self Psychology Foundation. She was a co-editor of Psychoanalysis, Self and Context with Roger Frie from 2015 to 2019 and is consulting editor of Psychoanalytic Inquiry. She has written four books including Toward a Psychology of Uncertainty: Trauma-Centered Psychoanalysis (2008) and many journal articles. She practices on the upper west side of Manhattan, New York, USA, and in Oslo, Norway.
Jon Sletvold is the founding board director of the Norwegian Character Analytic Institute. He has published books and articles on the role of the body in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. He is the author of The Embodied Analyst: From Freud and Reich to Relationality (2014), winner of the Gradiva Award in 2015. Co-director with Doris Brothers of the Wilhelm Reich Center for the Study of Embodiment.
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