Clinical theory is becoming a way of understanding oneself and one's
patients rather than a tool for determining the best technical
intervention as a thing in itself. This change has brought increased
recognition that different therapists need different theories with their
patients, and that even the same clinician may need different theories
at different times. As a result there is a new tolerance for and even an
encompassing of divergent viewpoints. Today is an age of multiple models
in psychotherapy. From Inner Sources: New Directions in Object Relations
Psychotherapy includes chapters by the most prominent contributors to
this change - Kernberg, Adler, Ogden, McDougall, Pine, and the Scharffs.
These clinicians, among others included, originally laid the base for
object relations theories in the United States. Their ideas about how
individuals grow and change by internalizing and externalizing
experience were derived from psychoanalytic investigations into severe
mental disorders. As these concepts have been more widely understood and
accepted, they have been applied to a wider range of disorders and
problems. Each chapter reflects in a different way how object relations
psychotherapies are moving in new directions while maintaining their
connection with the original inner source. The central concepts such as
empathy, containment, object identification, splitting,
counter-transference, and the examination of internal object relations'
newness are emphasized in each of the contributions. The chapters are
clinically relevant and contain significant case material. Although it
is not an introduction to object relations theory, this book is
understandable to beginning therapists, whilecontaining sufficient depth
and controversial discussion for advanced clinicians. The focus of this
book is on individual psychotherapy with emphasis on examination of the
therapist's intersubjective experience in relation to the patient, as
opposed to focusing on the patient's exp
