Systems and Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Integrations in Family Therapy (The Systemic Thinking and Practice Series)

"This intellectually rigorous and generative collection of papers, positioned at the intersection of systemic and psychoanalytic therapy, captures the potential synergy of bringing these two honoured traditions back into dialogue, on new terms. The editors do partisans of both fields a great service in this effort, since their long-standing mutual isolation has kept each dismissive of the other, and ignorant of developments in the other’s field―to their mutual detriment. The book tracks the ways in which innovative systemic practitioners are creatively reassembling the clinical and intellectual lineaments of psychodynamic and systems thinking in their work. While the strategies are many and varied, the collection as a whole reflects some of the deepest ideals and practices of both traditions at their best: holding complexity, tolerating contradiction, seeking common ground, seeing past limiting and ideologically driven binaries, thinking and working outside the box, and honouring history and tradition, even while digging it up." (Virginia Goldner)

Carmel Flaskas is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Work, University of New South Wales, Sydney, where she convenes the Masters program in couple and family therapy. Her contributions in family therapy include her work on the therapeutic relationship, on the translation of psychoanalytic ideas in the systemic context of work, and on knowledge and postmodernist ideas in therapy. With Amaryll Perlesz, she edited The Therapeutic Relationship in Systemic Therapy (Karnac 1996).

David Pocock is Head of Family Therapy at the Child and Family Consultation Service in Swindon, UK, and a visiting lecturer to the Bristol University. He is a current assessor for the Journal of Family Therapy and past member of the Editorial Board and previous moderator for the AFT / JFT internet discussion forum. He is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in independent practice and a member of the Severnside Institute for Psychotherapy where he currently chairs the Study Day Group. His published work ranges across systems theory, psychoanalysis, and the philosophical underpinnings of psychotherapy.