Is there a baby in the relational consulting room? How and when can/should we try to hold our patients? In Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective (second Edition), Joyce Slochower brings a contemporary relational framework to bear on Winnicott's notion of the holding environment. Slochower explores its function in those moments when "ordinary" interpretive or interactive work cannot be tolerated.
Key Features
- Revisits the clinical impact and theoretical underpinnings of holding.
- Expands the holding construct beyond the needs of dependent patients.
- Explores the coconstructed nature of holding between patient and analyst.
- Introduces new theoretical and clinical material, including four additional chapters.
- Examines holding's impact on the patient’s capacity to access, articulate, and process affect states.
Additional Information
The third chapter moves outside the consulting room to explore how holding functions in acts of memorial ritual across the lifespan. A final chapter presents Slochower’s latest ideas about holding’s clinical function in buffering shame states. Integrating Winnicott's seminal contributions with contemporary relational and feminist/psychoanalytic perspectives, Joyce Slochower addresses the therapeutic limitations of both interpretive and interactive clinical work. There are times, she argues, when patients cannot tolerate explicit evidence of the analyst's separate presence and instead need a holding experience. Slochower conceptualizes holding within a relational frame that includes both deliberate and enacted elements. In her view, the analyst does not hold alone; patient and analyst each participate in the establishment of a co-constructed holding space.
