Metapsychological Perspectives on Psychic Survival explores the integration of traumatic helplessness in the course of psychoanalytic treatment. Based on the author's many years of experience of working with psychotic and severely traumatised patients, this book offers guidelines to approach extreme psychic trauma in the therapeutic setting.

Simo Salonen links psychic representation of the elementary drive phenomena and metaphorical thinking to primary identification understood as a mode of object finding. The collapse of this connection signifies a radical psychic trauma, the integration of which into the temporal continuity of an individual's life is an essential task for psychoanalysis. Another key element of this book is Salonen's notion of the primal representative matrix, referring to a resource of primary narcissism that an individual has been endowed with, carrying vital meanings. Also explored is the crucial work of mourning, as the result of which the impoverished ego may recover its primary narcissistic resources.

Using insights from numerous case studies, Salonen offers a new way of understanding severe trauma, which can be used to advance both psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. Metapsychological Perspectives on Psychic Survival will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

About the Author

Simo Salonen, M.D., Ph.D. is a Training and Supervising Analyst of the Finnish Psychoanalytical Society and Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at the University of Turku, Finland.

Reviews

"In this book, Simo Salonen, the distinguished Finnish psychoanalyst, examines the infant's mind and expands theoretical considerations about an individual's psychic survival. Remarkable case presentations illustrate Salonen's metapsychological considerations. His decades long observations on primary identification, psychic trauma, repetition compulsion, mourning, the vulnerability of psychotic individuals, castration anxiety, solving intrapsychic conflict and structural transformation of an individual mind are very informative for all mental health professionals."-Vamik D. Volkan, M.D., Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry, University of Virginia and the author of Would-Be Wife Killer: A Clinical Study of Primitive Mental Functions, Actualized Unconscious Fantasies, Satellite States, and Developmental Steps.

"Dedicated to his severely distraught patients - they suffered from long-term psychosis, psychosomatic conditions, or severe depression - as well as to Freudian metapsychology, Simo Salonen has compiled a breath-taking review of his work as psychoanalyst and psychiatrist during the last 50 years. In success and failure, he helped his patients re-ignite a life-preserving and vitalising 'primal representative matrix.' His book is a unique treatise on Freud's hypothesis of a primary identification, the earliest unconscious impact on the infant of mother or father, or of mother and father. Salonen's book is a labour of love. It is recommended reading for any psychoanalyst or psychoanalytically interested other persons."-David Titelman, Ph.D., National Center for Suicide Research and Prevention Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm.

Book Information
ISBN 9780815384090
Author Simo Salonen
Format Paperback
Page Count 176
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Inc
Weight(grams) 249g