Description
Book SynopsisThe Ego and Analysis of Defense, by Paul Gray, without a doubt represents a major advance in analytic technique. How therapists listen and what they do with what they hear must be the primary issues that any technical approach addresses. Paul Gray shows how technique has, until now, lagged far behind theory in addressing these and other important questions. This book is essential reading for every practicing clinician.
Trade ReviewPaul Gray shows just what it takes to carry out the analysis of the ego, most of all the analysis of defense. An acknowledged master practitioner and teacher, he practices what he teaches, maximizing the patient's experiencing the flow of moments in the here-and-now clinical setting and relationship. This he does by steadily using and developing the patient's own powers of self-observation. An added benefit is an excellent section on supervision. Combining a firm allegiance to psychoanalytic tradition with expertise on the cutting edge of clinical work, Paul Gray's book meets a basic need that will be felt for as long as psychoanalysis lives; it is the need to maintain a focus 'not on the life,' as he says, but on the psyche that both makes that life and copes with it, often all too blindly. -- Roy Schafer, Ph.D.
Paul Gray challenges us to get rid of the last vestiges of our hypnotic-authoritarian roots and to refine a technique emphasizing the collaborative analytic effort to comprehend the patient's mind at work. The Ego and Analysis of Defense will be read with admiration for Dr. Gray's scholarship and creativity; at the end the reader will find Gray's position compelling, his argument sound. He is one of a small group of psychoanalysts who have earned the rank of master. -- Arnold D. Richards M.D., editor, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Assocation
