Main description:

The World Library of Mental Health celebrates the important contributions to mental health made by leading experts in their individual fields. Each author has compiled a career-long collection of what they consider to be their finest pieces: extracts from books, journals, articles, major theoretical and practical contributions, and salient research findings.

Leading psychoanalyst Joseph D. Lichtenberg is one of the most experienced and best respected psychoanalysts working in the US at present. In A Developmentalist's Approach to Research, Theory, and Therapy, he provides the reader with an opportunity to track the development of his conceptions in three realms of psychoanalysis:

Infant studies and developmentalist perspectives on the life cycle
Theoretical contributions to self-psychology
Motivational clinical contributions

Joseph Lichtenberg is a hugely influential name within US Psychoanalysis circles; this is the first collection of the seminal papers from his very long and distinguished career.

Contents:

Clinical Contributions: The empathic mode of perception and alternative vantage points for psychoanalytic work. Experience as a guide to psychoanalytic theory and practice. Model scenes, motivation, and personality. The significance of infant observational research for clinical work with children, adolescents, and adults. Listening, understanding, and interpreting: reflections on complexity. Creativity in the clinical dialogue.

Infant Studies and a Developmentalist Perspective On the Life Cycle: The challenge for psychoanalytic theory from neonate research. A clinician's view of attachment theory and research. The oedipus complex in the 21st century. Prince Hal's conflict, adolescent idealism, and buffoonery. Attachment love, romantic love, lustful love, lust without love, and transference love.

Theoretical contributions to self psychology and motivation: A theory of motivational-functional systems as psychic structures. Thoughts on The Analysis of the Self by Heinz Kohut. The development of the sense of self. Revisions and elaborations of motivational systems theory.

The experience of continuity and self-sameness despite multiple motivational states: An explanation by analogy