The Psychoanalytic Craft ― How to Develop As a Psychoanalytic Practitioner

Why is developing as a psychoanalytic practitioner so often laden with anxiety? A simple answer is that psychoanalytic work is intrinsically complex and difficult. But Laurence Spurling argues traditional accounts of practice make these difficulties even worse for students and practitioners: he shows that case descriptions and examples in psychoanalytic textbooks often give a misleading picture of practice, because they explore what practitioners ought to do rather than what they actually do.

The Psychoanalytic Craft uniquely identifies and explores what is missing in these accounts of therapy, namely the 'craft' aspects of skilled psychoanalytic work: how theories and models are actually used in practice, what kind of reasoning is employed in conducting a session, how interventions are composed and evaluated. The book draws on recent research, as well as the wider craft literature to show how these features of clinical thinking, which normally operate below the level of awareness, can be identified and explored in clinical practice, in supervision and in teaching.

This book has been written specifically for those students and practitioners moving beyond beginner level towards skilled and resourceful practice.

Laurence Spurling is Senior Lecturer in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College, UK, with overall responsibility for the counselling and psychotherapy programmes at Birkbeck. He is also a consultant adult psychotherapist and works in private practice as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. He is the author / editor of six previous books, including An Introduction to Psychodynamic Counselling, now in its second edition.