Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Passion Meanings and Manifestations in the Clinical Setting and Beyond

"The antithesis between reason and passion is as old as human thought. Reason tends to benign but oddly bloodless results: passion to intense but often-disastrous outcomes. This agonistic contrast necessarily pervades psychoanalytic thinking and, although implicit in the earliest psychoanalytic terminology-drive, ego, super-ego, death instinct- seems to have become vitiated in our current expansions of theory and practice. This wide-reaching and magisterial book redresses this issue. Passion, in all its clinical ramifications, is explored by a very eclectic and sophisticated spectrum of therapists. It should be of great interest and value to anyone, in or out of the field, for its sophisticated and enlightening exploration of what is ultimately at the root of the human dilemma."-Edgar A. Levenson, M.D, Fellow Emeritus, Training, Supervisory Analyst and Faculty at the William Alanson White Institute; Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology, NYU Graduate Studies Division.