Crossing Borders - Integrating Differences: Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in Transition

Crossing Borders - Integrating Differences is a collection of the papers delivered by psychoanalysts and analytic psychotherapists from the various countries of Europe at the Fifth Conference of the Adult Section of the European Federation for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the Public Sector (EFPP), in the year 2005. Held in Dresden, this conference brought together almost 400 analytic psychotherapists from Europe, all of them engaged within the EFPP, through their various national societies, in the different applications of psychoanalytic methods in the public healthcare sector – either in healthcare systems subject to public law or in those run by the state for in-patient and out-patient treatment and during rehabilitation. The theme of the conference “Crossing Borders - Integrating Differences“ required the speakers, as psychoanalytic psychotherapists, to give thought to their daily task of crossing borders and integrating differences.

This book with all its papers will stimulate the readers to cross borders: between theory and practice, between research and everyday therapy, between out-patient and in-patient psychotherapy, between the view of one’s own, the known and the culturally foreign. Yet it is only with an awareness of these borders, an acknowledgement and respect for them, that it will be possible to proceed towards integrating differences, where this makes sense and appears necessary.

Contributors: Elitsur Bernstein; Christopher Bollas; Peter Bründl; Michael B. Buchholz; Georgia Chalkia; Bernard Golse; Stephan Hau; Grigoris Maniadakis; Luisa Perrone; Jan Philipp Reemtsma; Maurizio Russo; Hermann Staats; Martin Teising; Sieglinde Eva Toemmel; Irini Vlahaki.