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International Forum of Psychoanalysis 20, 6-17, 2011
Opposing attitudes, emotions, or perceptions of self and other that set the stage for experiences of duality influence our interactions and self-other schemas. The experience of duality that has been conceptualized as ‘conflict,’ ‘self state’ and ‘paradox’ in psychoanalytic theory has been extensively considered, particularly in terms of its manifestation in transference-countertransference relations and in the analytic material from patients' experiences. They have not, however, been compared and contrasted as entities that lead to similar kinds of experience. Scant attention has been paid, moreover, to paradox as a mental organization that underlies certain experiences of duality. The concept of paradox has thus been emphasized and developed in this paper.
Journal of Child Psychotherapy 37(1), 31-51, 2011
In this paper, I explore how we might link ideas about clinical facts to current issues in child psychotherapy research. I consider what our understanding of clinical facts might contribute to our research methods and how our research methods might better represent the clinical facts. The paper introduces a selection of psychoanalytic writers' formulations of the concept and describes some of the debates about the shortcomings of the traditional style of case reporting. The importance of keeping emotional experience central in our research is discussed. I describe a research method that, I believe, has the potential to capture and describe some of the complicated processes of change in psychotherapy. This is the concept of the ‘turning point’ session. Introducing the paradigm of complexity theory, I briefly explore how we might think about and understand the relationship between processes revealed through detailed analysis of a single session and change over a longer period of therapy.