ABSTRACT
In The Biology of Clinical Encounters, Gedo utilizes recent findings in neuroscience and cognitive psychology to elaborate his conception of psychobiology and to consider its implications in clinical analysis. He pursues this challenging undertaking in several directions. He illuminates the way in which psychobiology enters into his hierarchical model of mental functioning, and goes on to examine three clinical syndromes - phobias, obsessions, and affective disturbances - in which biological considerations are particularly important. Of special note are chapters examining the implications of a biological approach for clinical psychoanalysis. Gedo explores the notion of transference that grows out of attentiveness to psychobiological factors, elaborates the concept of therapeutics that follows from looking beyond mental contents, and discusses the problem of assessing clinical evidence produced by analyses informed by a psychobiological orientation. Drawing on his own analytic work of over three decades, he compares analyses conducted with a psychobiological orientation with the outcome of analyses conducted earlier in his career with a more traditional psychological approach.
A stimulating introduction to the interpenetration of the biological and the psychological in clinical work, The Biology of Clinical Encounters is quintessential Gedo: scholarly in conception, elegant in tone, provocative in import, and illuminating, always, of fundamental issues about the status of psychoanalysis as a science of mind.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|22 pages
Toward the Biology of Mind
part II|60 pages
Biology and Clinical Syndromes
chapter Chapter 3|20 pages
The Hierarchical Model of Mental Functioning
chapter Chapter 4|10 pages
Challenge, Apraxia, and Avoidance
chapter Chapter 5|12 pages
Obsessionality, Magical Beliefs, and the Hierarchical View of Mental Life
chapter Chapter 6|16 pages
Affective Disorders and the Capacity to Modulate Feeling States
part III|48 pages
From Biology to Clinical Psychoanalysis
chapter Chapter 7|12 pages
An Epistemology of Transference
chapter Chapter 8|12 pages
The Psychoanalytic Paradigm and its Alternatives
chapter Chapter 9|10 pages
Clinical Evidence as the Basis of Analytic Theory and Modifications of Analytic Technique
chapter Chapter 10|12 pages
The Therapeutic Results of Psychoanalysis: Outcome and Technique
part IV|40 pages
Psychoanalysis and Contemporaneity