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Reaching the Affect is a work that carries promise of gaining permanence on one's shelf of prized volumes. Its memorable accomplishments include, first off, brilliantly conceived therapy conceptions and that rare capacity to open up interventive technique to allow in, past craft, the artistic.
Having made an imprint on clinical psychology via his enduring contributions to the art of interpreting projective drawings, Mr. Hammer next turned his explorative interests to the area of psychoanalysis and technique, producing his initial influence on our practice by his Use of Interpretation in Treatment: Style and Art, followed now by the full flowering of his talents in the current book. Stretching from first to last is a feel for imagery. Both his power as a writer and his power as a therapist draw from his love of language and metaphor.
This book addresses the sinews of the healing process, creating, for therapy, a new and exciting imaginal language, to more effectively connect with the patient. A wise therapy strategist, Hammer has devoted considerable love, care, and imagination to this groundbreaking project of drawing from the creative writers what we might learn for our communicative style with our patients.
Studying the major novelists, playwrights, and poets, Hammer has evolved a means of offering us interventions in treatment, interventions expressed in the concentrated, emotionally textured imagery of the poet, which might then penetrate past the patient's cognitive zones into the affect below, as Hammer puts it, “to connect not just with the head, but also with