J. M. Barrie's popular story of Peter Pan depicts the never-neverland of an endless happy childhood. Analysis of the story and of J. M. Barrie's personal background, however, reveals that the tale is a conflicted solution to and separation from early childhood losses and disappointments. Themes of separation and reunion, redesertion and revenge…

Traces the history of psychological therapies, including behavior therapy and humanistic therapies that challenged the initially dominant psychoanalytic model. Examines the development of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy and the British Confederation of Psychotherapists, as well as other developments, such as psychotherapeutic studies…

Psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in general do not apprehend the data of their field in any strict literal sense. Rather, they prefigure psychopathological data at a precognitive level. This prefiguration employs one or more of the poetic tropes of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Each psychotherapy achieves its particular explanatory…

Adherence to a variety of conceptual frameworks in psychological treatment has resulted in technical and theoretical eclecticism. Therapy techniques have become reduced to a set of tactics in which the therapist juggles conceptual frameworks in an attempt to maximize constructive behavior change. The practitioner must conceptualize his therapeutic…

Therapeutic communication, or interaction which provokes personal insight or reorientation, can be best understood as a transactive, rather than linear, interrelationship between people or groups. Two practical responses to "pathological" communication patterns illustrate the validity of the transactional communication theory: the…

As therapy relationships between female therapists and female clients become more prevalent, there is a need to address the attributes of these relationships. Psychoanalytic object relations theory and feminist theory can be used to arrive at a meaningful context for viewing the dimension of intimacy. Psychoanalytic literature on the mother/infant…

Although incompatible differences appear to exist between psychoanalytic therapy, which involves a hierarchical relationship, and feminism, which stresses egalitarian values, some versions of psychoanalytic theory are able to maintain their hierarchy within a context consistent with feminist values. Freud touched on the importance of the…