The Inner World in the Outer World: Psychoanalytic Perspectives

As psychoanalysis enters its second century, practitioners and researchers are shifting away from the focus on the isolated individual and toward analysis of the individual in the context of his or her society and culture. To understand the way people live, says Edward Shapiro, we must explore the boundary of experience, where inner and outer worlds converge. In this highly readable collection, nine leading psychoanalysts and psychologists -- including Roy Schafer, Arnold Modell, Carol Gilligan, Otto Kernberg, and Joyce McDougall -- investigate the changing analytic situation.

This book is intended for mental health professionals, organizational theorists, psychologists, sociologists, and others with an interest in how opening the analytic situation beyond the two-person field is broadening the theory and illuminating the nature of unconscious interaction. The authors inquire into such topics as whether psychoanalysts are able to address the impact of external pressures on the treatment without losing their interpretive role; the internal processes revealed by external conformity and stark individualism; the relationship between preoedipal and oedipal factors and artistic creativity; how ideology and bureaucracy in society can be understood as a defense against large-group aggression; and how women's characteristic ways of learning can help change a culturally sanctioned dissociation between the inner and outer worlds.