Search results for ""Author T. Byram Karasu""

Psychotherapists have a love-hate relationship with theories, often clinging to those that are unsatisfying and incomplete. Deconstruction of Psychotherapy examines the functions and failings of theory, and, most critically for clinicians, the gap between theory and practice. It looks at the purposes and perils of ardent allegiances irrespective of a particular school or strategy. This means examining the many uses and abuses of the clinician's belief system. While therapists need to be committed to a body of beliefs, an inability to look beyond it can be countertherapeutic; hiding behind a theory may be as bad as not having one to relinquish. Moreover, deconstruction of the positive and negative elements of theory reveals therapists' uncertainty as they acknowledge that one of their compasses resides somewhere between myth and truth.

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Maxims Minimus is the sedimentation of over forty years of experience in teaching, writing, and treating patients. As many other poets, T. Byram Karasu dares to be just so clear, and no clearer. Thus, Dr. Karasu’s Maxims is well suited for this age of Twitter and text messages. He says, “Anything that cannot be said in 140 characters (or in 140 seconds) is not particularly worth saying.” This book is Dr. Karasu’s reflections about loving, working, living, dying, and everything else—his philosophy of life expressed in microstyle.

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This book, which focuses on the psychotherapist's interventions, presents the basic critical activity of the therapist. It applies two predominant paradigms–conflict and deficit–in the treatment of a wide range of patients. The therapist must address and deal with conflictual concomitants as well as developmental derailments because the patient is a product of both. Excerpts of verbatim dialogue are offered to articulate the course of psychotherapeutic interaction as a successive series of co-created communications. Explicit commentaries, interwoven throughout the text, inform the reader of the practitioner's rationale for the particular stand taken (for better or worse) at each moment of the therapeutic process. They provide an intimate vehicle through which to listen to, and understand, the clinician's inner voice during the real-life practice of psychotherapy. Pathology and practice reside on a continuum. Conflict theory does not apply solely to the neuroses, nor does object relations apply only to borderline disorders, and self theory need not be reserved for narcissistic disturbances. The hysterical patient can have ego deficits as well as sexual conflicts; similarly, the depressive patient can show self deficiencies as well as unresolved conflictual problems. Moreover, conflicts are not necessarily restricted to oedipal phases nor deficits to preoedipal ones. Dr. Karasu delineates a clinical approach by which psychotherapy can be geared toward remedying both the underlying psychological deficits (lacks) and the conflicts (wishes/fears) in the progressive maturation and adaptation of an individual. He effectively integrates the major psychodynamic models. No single school can meet the needs of the practitioner in interaction with all patients. Psychotherapy practice for the future will be based on the individual patient's developmental pathology and problems, deficits and conflicts, defenses and compromise formations, unfulfilled needs and unfinished tasks, as well as the level of adaptation and

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