Leffert Mark. Positive Psychoanalysis: Meaning, Aesthetics and Subjective Well-Being

Routledge, 2017. — 189 p. — ISBN10: 1138960861. — ISBN13: 978-1138960862.Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy have, in one way or another, focused on the amelioration of the negative. This has only done half the job; the other half being to actively bring Positive Experience into patients' lives. Positive Psychoanalysis moves away from this traditional focus on negative experience and problems, and instead looks at what makes for a positive life experience, bringing a new clinical piece to what psychoanalysts do: Positive Psychoanalysis and the interdisciplinary theory and research behind it.
The envelope of functions entailed in Positive Psychoanalysis is an area of Being described as Subjective Well-Being. This book identifies three particular areas of function encompassed by SWB: Personal Meaning, Aesthetics, and Desire. Mark Leffert looks at the importance of these factors in our positive experiences in everyday life, and how they are manifested in clinical psychoanalytic work. These domains of Being form the basis of chapters, each comprising an interdisciplinary discussion integrating many strands of research and argument. Leffert discusses how the areas interact with each other and how they come to bear on the care, healing, and cure that are the usual subjects of psychoanalytic treatment. He also explores how they can be represented in contemporary psychoanalytic theory.
This novel work discusses and integrates research findings, phenomenology, and psychoanalytic thought that have not yet been considered together. It seeks to inform readers about these subjects and demonstrates, with clinical examples, how to incorporate them into their clinical work with the negative, helping patients not just to heal the negative but also move into essential positive aspects of living: a sense of personal meaning, aesthetic competence, and becoming a desiring being that experiences Subjective Well-Being.
Drawing on ideas from across neuroscience, philosophy, and social and culture studies, this book sets out a new agenda for covering the positive in psychoanalysis. Positive Psychoanalysis will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, neuroscientists and philosophers, as well as academics across these fields and in psychiatry, comparative literature and literature and the mind.The phenomenological self, its environs, and its therapistA [very] short course in phenomenology as it pertains to psychoanalysis
The holistic self and its relations with world
The historicity of the self
Complexity theory and psychoanalysis
The deployment of power in the therapeutic situation
The interreferential search for meaning and narrative
Care, healing, and cure of the patient
To sum up
In pursuit of personal meaningThe phenomenology of meaning
Psychoanalysis and the phenomenology of meaning
Meaning over the life cycle and the impact of culture
The mid-century existential quest for meaning
The neuropsychology of meaning: Dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s
The capacity for aesthetic experience: The subjectivity of beautyThe aesthetic
The phenomenology of the aesthetic
The aesthetic and the social
Developmental considerations
Taste
The neuropsychology of aesthetic being
Aesthetics and psychoanalysisAesthetics: Classical psychoanalytic practices
A specimen: Life of Pi and “Life of Pi and the Moral Wound”
Aesthetics in contemporary psychoanalytic practice
The fairy tale in aesthetic practice
Cases: Bill, Steve, and Terry
DesireGeneral considerations and definitions
The biology and neuropsychology of desire
Desire and its place in social networks
Psychoanalysis and the phenomenology of desire
The psychopathology of desire and its clinical importance
SEEKING and Desire in the therapeutic situation
Subjective Well-BeingSubjective Well-Being: Discipline and postmodern science
Subjective Well-Being and character
The biology of Subjective Well-Being
Clinical considerations
Positive psychoanalysis: Putting it all together