Standing in the Spaces: Essays on Clinical Process Trauma and Dissociation

By Philip M. Bromberg

Book Overview

Early in these essays, Bromberg contemplates how one might engage schizoid detachment within an interpersonal perspective. To his surprise, he finds that the road to the patient's disavowed experiences most frequently passes through the analyst's internal conversation, as multiple configurations of self-other interaction, previously dissociated, are set loose first in the analyst and then played out in the interpersonal field.

This insight leads to other discoveries. Beneath the dissociative structures seen in schizoid patients, and also in other personality disorders, Bromberg regularly finds traumatic experience -- even in patients not otherwise viewed as traumatized. This discovery allows interpersonal notions of psychic structure to emerge in a new light, as Bromberg arrives at the view that all severe character pathology masks dissociative defenses erected to ward off the internal experience of trauma and to keep the external world at bay to avoid retraumatization. These insights, in turn, open to a new understanding of dissociative processes as intrinsic to the therapeutic process per se. For Bromberg, it is the unanticipated eruption of the patient's relational world, with its push-pull impact on the analyst's effort to maintain a therapeutic stance, that makes possible the deepest and most therapeutically fruitful type of analytic experience.

Bromberg's essays are delightfully unpredictable, as they strive to keep the reader continually abreast of how words can and cannot capture the subtle shifts in relatedness that characterize the clinical process. Indeed, at times Bromberg's writing seems vividly to recreate the alternating states of mind of the relational analyst at work. Stirringly evocative in character and radiating clinical wisdom infused with compassion and wit, Standing in the Spaces is a classic destined to be read and reread by analysts and therapists for decades to come.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0881633569
• ISBN13: 9780881633566
• Release Date: July 2001
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 376 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

From the brilliant mind of Philip Bromberg

This work is at the edge of whatever is culmination in psychoanalysis. Dense and sometime a mind twister it is a profound and human journey as the author's title says "Standing in the spaces" Bromberg his pushing and moving psychoanalysis straight forward.He is part of those guys that makes the world progress. A compelling must read "ouvrage" for all clinicians...A Brilliant moving book

Luminous and richly rewarding.

What a fascinating and remarkable book. Bromberg's subtlety, ingenuity and insight combine in -- how rare!--elegantly accessible prose to produce a book full of ideas. I found it luminous and richly rewarding.

A treasure of clinical insight

To read Bromberg is to be invited into the mind of one of the most sophisticated analytic clinicians writing today. His writings style wonderfully conveys the subtle, barely thinkable complexities of clinical process, those hardly noticeable contours of interpersonal meaning shaping the feel of a given moment in a session. Bromberg is able to put into words what all therapists have experienced but few have been able to describe. Although the more abstract theoretical components of his thinking are not quite as coherent as one might wish (a lot of model-mixing here) this flaw becomes almost insignificant in the face of the scintillating brilliance of Bromberg's clinical insight.