Clinical Dicta and Contra Dicta: The Therapy Process from Inside Out and Outside In

Clinical Dicta and Contra Dicta is a series of reflections that the author has pondered in one form or another over the past thirty-five years of practice. Some are more theoretically or philosophically based while the others tend to be more clinically specific.

The book looks at the therapy process from both the inside out and the outside in. The thoughts and brief clinical scenarios that are included are those that the author believes to be of fundamental importance when one considers what one does as a psychotherapist/analyst. They are written to stimulate consideration of their content. Over many years of sitting with patients and supervisers, the author found that the themes represented here kept emerging in one form or another: Are we winsome or loathsome? Are we self-knowing or self-concealing? Psychoanalysis is a psychic pilgrimage, that reveals both the depths of our capacity to love and of our depravity. As these pages suggest, life is not clean and is fraught with temptations to undermine those behaviors which are in our own best interests, the greatest perhaps being those deceptions about what we reveal of who we really are.

Part One explores these dynamics in the form of Laconic adages; Part Two considers contradiction in clinical vignettes; while Part Three examines how serial killers, one of the author's specialized areas of research, use projective-identification to groom and ultimately ensnare their victims. The author's insights here into how a serial perpetrator uses projective-identification are both insightful and compelling.