Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

This book is SO good I don't understand why it's never been recommended in graduate training! While the author is famous for his texts and trainings on ISTDP, he has a wealth of knowledge on the whole breadth of psychoanalytic traditions and it comes across clearly in this book. It literally takes you through all the different ways of listening in psychodynamic psychotherapy and gives you a chance to practice coming up with interventions from those perspectives, and explains why one intervention would be more effective at achieving a certain goal than another. The chapter on reflections was phenomenal. If you think grad school taught you how to do proper reflections, think again. The book showed me how I've been reflecting by parroting or paraphrasing rather than helping to lift out implicit meanings, and how something as simple as only reflecting anxiety can be a form of abandonment as the patient just becomes stuck rather than able to consider alternatives. If one task as a therapist is to listen in a way that helps patients understand themselves in a new light so that they can see options that they didn't even know were there, this book teaches you how to listen to accomplish that. Reading and working through the exercises honestly makes learning psychotherapy fun.

I was in a forum where I was asked to read this book first before Jon’s co creating safety book. I wish this was a requirement for all schools. It is exactly the type of learning that can add confidence for learning and especially newly licensed therapists. I am so glad to have found this and it is so rich of examples I sometimes have to re read the page to make sure I’m getting it. I am not done yet and feel like I am going to want to re read it again later. Definitely cannot go wrong at all!

Excellent and helpful book, that actually makes you think for yourself, so it's more a case of learning-by-doing, which makes the lessons and points contained within stick in your mind all the better. Take the time and consider each case presented, and you'll gain much more than if you just read through this quickly.Even though the author's book "Co-Creating Change" contains more advanced and useful techniques, this book is, in my opinion, much more well-written.

Very good for beginning therapists to learn how to listen, understand underlying causes of behavior, transference, countertransference, and How & when to make interpretations.

An excellent text to learn the basics of psychodynamic therapy. Provides detailed explanations with clinical examples. One of the better books on practical application of psychodynamic therapy.

For all the reading I have to do, this is a very easy text to breeze through. This was a good choice on my instructor's part.

Regardless of a therapist's theoretical orientation, this is a very useful book, especially for the beginning clinician. I wish had known about it when I was a supervisor.

This is not a how-to manual for psychodynamic therapy. There is no color-by-numbers when it comes to psychoanalysis, so if you want to understand the basics of what psychoanalysis is all about, go to Freud's Introductory Lectures. But if what you want is a primer on how to LISTEN therapeutically, this is the right place to start. What is shown here are the basic listening competences that therapy requires. It's a good first step on the path to learning the setting for a psychodynamic healing process -just a beginning, but a just beginning.