The Difficult Art: A Critical Discourse on Psychotherapy

Margritte is a poet of dreams. His painting present to the eye of the observer an enigma having the same coded density as the oneiric world.

In a frenetic society that has given up dreams and fantasy, that is characterized by people rushing vertiginously ahead, like guinea pigs continually bombarded with stimuli rushing madly around their cage, the analyst's task is to recover the imaginary, the poetry of the soul, of the psyche. In this sense, the therapist must necessarily be portrayed as a wayfarer who lives life as if it were a never ending voyage. Every stop is marked by an encounter, at every stop a face awaits.

And in that lost and bewildered stranger who asks to be shown the way, one begins traveling down a new stretch of the road. It is in the patient that the analyst finds the eagerly awaited fellow traveler.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Searching for a Response

Romantic Roots

The Paradox of Rules

As You Are (With the Kind Permission of Pirandello)

The Difficult Art of Being Subjective The Lonely Path of the Individual

An Excursion into the Analytical Field: Cultivating the Relationship

In Search of the Primary Relationship Ties That Do Not Bind

A Starless Night: The Road to Desire The Analyst's Knowledge of Sentiment Gentle Repose Banished

Jung in Unexplored Territory

More Talk About Sentiments

Science Moves, But Reluctantly Homeless, Outlawed, and on the Road: On Our Own

If This Be Madness

An Epilogue: Magritte's "Therapist" Bibliography

Index