Clinical Dicta and Contra Dicta: The Therapy Process from Inside Out and Outside In(The Karnac Library)

This book looks at the therapy process from both the inside out and the outside in. Over many years of sitting with patients and supervisees, Dr John Espy 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 the depths of both our capacity to love and our depravity. Life is not clean and is fraught with temptations to undermine those behaviours 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 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.

About the Author :
John C. Espy, PhD, LCSW, has been practicing psychotherapy and psychoanalysis for the past thirty-five years. He was supervised by R.D. Laing for many years and conducted a weekly supervision group with Sheldon Kopp. He has worked extensively in the area of primitive and psychotic personalities and has interviewed more than twenty serial murderers and pedophiles in the United States and Europe as part of his research on the manifestation of malignant projective-identification. His current practice primarily focuses on clinical and forensic consultation and long term treatment. He was previously a neurotoxicologist with NASA and has taught at numerous universities throughout the United States. Dr Espy is also a long standing member of the American Academy of Psychotherapists, the American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work and northwestern United States group moderator for the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society.

Review :
'From the author of searing books on serial murder comes a collection of thoughts and pressures brewing during some thirty-five years of practice. It contains showers of insight, dramatic vignettes, and pointed attempts to penetrate the core of psyche and life. The author is touched by streaming impacts on many levels which he shares with the readers, who should prepare themselves for galactic travel in the detailed, down to earth work we do.'- Michael Eigen, author of Image, Sense, Infinities, and Everyday Life'This book's slender form belies its hidden depths. Many of John C. Espy's thoughts are so wise they should be inscribed in stone. Every page was a delight, offering a potent blend of wisdom and thought-provoking insights - micro-truths garnered from the consulting room that become universal maxims. It would be an understatement to describe John C. Espy's book as thought provoking. I found myself mulling over his words long after I had finished reading.'- Antonino Ferro, President of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, and author of Reveries: An Unfettered Mind