Modes of Therapeutic Action - by Martha Stark (Paperback)

About the Book

How do we position ourselves in relation to our patients? Do we participate as neutral object, as empathetic self-object, or as authentic subject? Do we strive to enhance the patient's knowledge, to provide a corrective experience, or to work at the intimate edge?

Book Synopsis

How do we position ourselves in relation to our patients? Do we participate as neutral object, as empathetic self-object, or as authentic subject? Do we strive to enhance the patient's knowledge, to provide a corrective experience, or to work at the intimate edge?

Review Quotes

A remarkable book. Stark illustrates the therapeutic action of the major psychoanalytic theoretical paradigms with many vignettes that clinicians will readily be able to recognize from their own practices. The clinical moments are described with extraordinary candor and vividness. This integration of theory and practice makes the book both highly relevant clinically, and extremely instructive theoretically.

In a time of quick fixes, Martha Stark's book on the modes of therapeutic action is a treasure that examines the very soul of the healing process. Honoring and integrating the contributions of separate schools of psychoanalytic thought, she squarely places the shared humanness of therapist and patient at the center of all therapeutic change. I have never read a better book about the essential complexity and beauty of the therapeutic process.

Martha Stark has brought together the three fundamental theories about how therapy works that prevail in our field at present, and has shrewdly drawn out the virtues of each. Her own integrated conception is at once sophisticated and practical. Therapists of every level of experience will profit from it. Engaging and convincing clinical vignettes bring Stark's concepts alive, illustrating them in a way that resonates with a practitioner's experience. Modes of Therapeutic Action is a no-nonsense, deeply human, eminently useful study of what really thappens in a successful psychotherapy.

With Modes of Therapeutic Action, Martha Stark has taken the fledgling field of comparative psychoanalysis into a new and important domain. She develops in great detail a framework for contrasting and exploring the major contemporary models of the analytic process. She takes us underneath the slogans and banners of the various schools so that we may compare their underlying concepts and presuppositions. And she demonstrates what different technical systems actually look like in live action by presenting a remarkably rich array of clinical examples. This book will contribute to the enrichment of both the thinking and clinical sensibility of clinicians at all levels of experience and sophistication.

About the Author

Martha Stark, M.D., a graduate of the Harvard Medical School and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, is a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst in private practice in Newton Centre, Massachusetts. Dr. Stark is on the faculty of both the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. She is also a Clinical Instructor in Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, has a teaching appointment at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, and is on the faculty of the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies at the Massachusetts General Hospital.