Relating to Self-Harm and Suicide presents original studies and research from contemporary psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and academics focusing on the psychoanalytic understanding of suicide and self-harm and how this can be applied to clinical work and policy.
This book suggests that suicide and self-harm must be understood as having meaning within interpersonal and intrapsychic relationships, offering a new and more hopeful approach to prevention and recovery. Divided into three sections, this revised edition includes a theoretical overview and conceptual framework, psychoanalytic practice with self-harming and suicidal patients and applications of psychoanalytic thinking to suicide and self-harm prevention. Enriched with detailed examples illustrating this approach in a range of settings and with different groups and populations, this book offers an international perspective and contemporary understanding of psychoanalytic approaches to working with suicidal and self-harming people.
This book will be helpful to psychoanalytic psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and other mental health professionals wanting to integrate psychoanalytic ideas into their work with self-harming and suicidal people. It will also be useful to academics, teachers, researchers and policymakers involved in suicide prevention.
Table of Contents:
Part I: Conceptual Framework 1. Psychoanalysis and suicide: process and typology 2. The father transference during a pre-suicide state 3. Self break-up and the descent into suicide 4. Psychoanalysis and suicide: process and typology 5. A psychoanalytical approach to suicide in adolescents 6. Treatment priorities after adolescent suicide attempts 7. Mental pain, pain-producing constructs, the suicidal body, and suicide Part II: Psychoanalytic Practice 8. Hostility and suicide: the experience of aggression from within and without 9. Suicidal thoughts during an analysis 10. Suicidality and women: obsession and the use of the body 11. Hostility and suicide: the experience of aggression from within and without 12. Hostility and suicide: the experience of aggression from within and without Part III: Applications in practice, prevention and postvention 13. On suicide prevention in hospitals: empirical observations and psychodynamic thinking 14. On being affected without being infected: managing suicidal thoughts in student counselling 15. Suicidality in later life 16. Skin toughening and skin porosity: adressing the issue of self-harm by omission 17. Psychological safety: a missing concept in suicide risk prevention 18. Postvention: the impact of suicide and suicidal behaviour on adolescents and parents 19. The delusional narrative of suicide bereavement and the psychodynamics of suicide loss 20. Speaking with the Skin: Self Harm and its Meanings for Incarcerated Women 21. When gender is a carrier for the unbearable: Understanding suicidality in transgender individuals 22. Gay men and suicidality: the development and nature of the critical superego 23. Psychoanalytic understanding of the request for assisted suicide
About the Author :
Stephen Briggs, PhD, is an emeritus professor at the University of East London and an honorary professor at the Universities of Exeter and Nottingham. He is a member of the Tavistock Society of Psychotherapists and a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.
Alessandra Lemma is a fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society and a chartered clinical and counselling psychologist. She is also a visiting professor for the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London and a consultant at the Anna Freud Centre.
William Crouch was a consultant clinical psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist in the NHS. He is a fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society and now works in private practice.
Review :
'Suicide is inevitably a relational experience – it occurs in relation to one’s own body, to internal objects, and external objects, including professionals who are attempting to help. A psychoanalytic perspective, with its inevitable focus on the relational field, allows for an understanding of suicide and self-harm in all its complexity, thus paving the way for more nuanced approaches to treatment and prevention. This scholarly collection of chapters contains psychoanalytic perspectives from an international and varied group of experts in the field. The editors have successfully updated the 2008 version to reflect the significant changes that have occurred in socio-cultural and institutional contexts, bringing in new chapters on high-risk groups such as gay men, transgender individuals and women in prison. Discussions on assisted dying and bereavement by suicide sit well alongside the expanded elucidation and elaboration of psychoanalytic theory to consider the dynamics of suicide and self-harm. This is a book that should be widely available to clinicians, educators, service managers and policy makers.'
Dr Joanne Stubley, consultant medical psychotherapist & psychoanalyst, Tavistock Trauma Service, Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust
'This important book brings together comprehensive trauma and psychoanalytic informed perspectives on suicide drawing together the voices and experience of leading clinical practitioners and researchers working in the field of suicide study. The book makes for essential reading for psychotherapists and counsellors, but also should be digested by all practitioners working in mental health settings who will inevitably come into contact with clients who have suicidal feelings. Thinking about suicide and talking about suicide is difficult we know, but this book makes that challenge a bit easier.'
Professor Gary Winship, Education, Trauma & Mental Health, University of Nottingham. Editor-in-Chief, British Journal of Psychotherapy.
'Relating to Self-harm and Suicide: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Practice, Theory and Prevention offers a comprehensive approach to understanding the subject, written by leading psychoanalytic clinicians and writers. This book will be indispensable for all psychotherapists and clinicians working across the life span, and I would strongly recommend this to anybody working in the field of helping individuals with issues related to self-harm and suicidality.'
Dr Danny Goldberger, consultant child & adolescent psychotherapist, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, Lambeth CAMHS
'Psychoanalytic ideas challenge processes of simplification and rationalisation which ultimately conceal very painful realities; we are all potentially vulnerable to suicidal states of mind and action, we may be bereaved by suicidal acts undertaken by those we love and attempt to help and we ultimately may not be able to prevent this happening despite our best efforts. The chapters within this book illuminate this profound and difficult reality and show how from a psychoanalytic frame we can look into some of the most violent acts, causing the deepest pain to others, with curiosity, intellectual commitment and emotional openness to provide ways to understand based upon humanity, intellectual rigour and courage.'
Dr J O’Reilly consultant psychiatrist in Medical Psychotherapy, chair medical psychotherapy faculty Royal College of Psychiatrists, member, British Psychoanalytic Society
