Deepening the Treatment - by Jane S Hall (Paperback)

About the Book

Almost everyone who crosses the therapist's threshold is looking for a second chance-a shot at living a richer, less restricted life. Understanding how echoes of the past resonate in and shape the present provides opportunities to resolve crippling conflicts and make new choic...

Book Synopsis

Almost everyone who crosses the therapist's threshold is looking for a second chance-a shot at living a richer, less restricted life. Understanding how echoes of the past resonate in and shape the present provides opportunities to resolve crippling conflicts and make new choices. Furthermore, such insight produces a sense of mastery. But not everyone is aware that the problems s/he brings into weekly therapy are just the first few bars of his or her song. Jane Hall wrote Deepening the Treatment to help the psycho-dynamically informed therapist help the patient recognize that exploring ideas and feelings is a journey worth taking and that the therapist is a trustworthy guide. Often, people need to wade before they feel comfortable diving into deep waters. Hall introduces a responsible if unconventional application of respectful, nondirective therapy, and she supports her vision with clinical examples and thoughtful attention to issues of basic technique-among them separation, termination, self-disclosure, frequency of sessions, tolerating patient rage, and, of course, interpreting the transference.

Review Quotes

Deepening the Treatment offers an essential guide to those in training, to the less experienced and to all those of us who from time to time need help in thinking through how to deepen our work. Each chapter offers clear useful insights illustrated by clinical examples that demonstrate the range of Hall's experience as clinician, teacher and supervisor. All in all this is a highly accessible and warmly written book that would be a useful addition to any training reading list.

A well-organized, comprehensive and practical guide to psychoanalysis. The book is exceedingly well written and enjoyable to read.

Deepening the Treatment offers an essential guide to those in training, to the less experienced and to all those of us who from time to time need help in thinking through how to deepen our work. Each chapter offers clear useful insights illustrated by clinical examples that demonstrate the range of Hall's experience as clinician, teacher and supervisor. All in all this is a highly accessible and warmly written book that would be a useful addition to any training reading list....

Drawing on her long and thoughtful experience as a clinician supervisor, and teacher of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, Jane Hall has produced a helpful, down-to-earth, and easily readable book of guidance for those practitioners who are less experienced and less secure. Her attitude is a model of respectfulness, empathy, patience, and benign curiosity, and she uses clinical examples to demonstrate how, from the first contact with the patient, one may continuously deepen the treatment on the way to reaching significant insights. Psychoanalytic work emerges in its true light as an individualized and collaborative search for routes toward a self-fulfilling life.

Jane Hall's emphasis is on preventing treatment from remaining superficial. Her book adds an important dimenson to the literature. It describes a special kind of respect for the patient and the latent meanings of the patient's manifest utterances, and it stresses the use of the transference as a prime took in deepening the treatment. The book is especially welcome as a balance to the proliferation of therapies that overlook the unconscious.

About the Author

Jane S. Hall, M.S.W., is a founder of the New York School for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. A Training and Supervising Analyst who has taught, lectured, and consulted on how to deepen psychoanalytic work for the past eighteen years, Jane Hall is in private practice in New York City.