Despair and the Return of Hope: Echoes of Mourning in Psychotherapy / Edition 1

by Peter C. Shabad

Overview

When unmourned experiences of helplessness and disavowed desires turn into a passive fatalism, people stop hoping for the best and fear the worst, despairing that the real world has anything good to offer. This can lead individuals to memorialize past sufferings through psychological symptoms and compulsive repetitions. Dr. Shabad discusses how patients, after many years of living a life limited by resentment, fear, and despair, can come to terms with their childhood experiences: a mother who can never be satisfied, a father who consistently buries his head in the newspaper. He explains how people can overcome hardships endured and losses suffered. The authentic spontaneous dialogue between therapist and patient provides the generosity and courage necessary to shed their now obsolete defenses and mourn what cannot be remedied or replaced. Rich clinical material demonstrates how mourning can bring about self-acceptance, and set individuals free to take responsibility for and live out their own personal truths. This is a deeply felt, and beautifully written tribute to the redemptive power of psychotherapy and to the regenerative capabilities in all human beings.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780765705815
Publisher:	Aronson, Jason Inc.
Publication date:	09/26/2007
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.05(w) x 9.04(h) x 1.11(d)

About the Author

Peter Shabad, Ph.D. is currently an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Northwestern University Medical School. He teaches, supervises, and maintains a private practice in Chicago.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction	xiii
Part I	Huddling Together in the Face of Death
1	Death, Meaning, and Human Relations	3
2	Conscience and the Ethic of Mutuality: Human Development as a Passionate Labor of Gratitude	35
Part II	Disillusionment, Defense, and the Despair of Bitterness
3	Selling One's Developmental Soul: Self-Betrayal and Wearing the Mask of the Enemy	57
4	The Compulsion to Repeat: Homesickness and to Begin Again as if for the First Time	87
5	The Silent Loyalty Oath: Symptoms as Memorials to One's Lonely Suffering	109
6	On the outside Looking in: "Waiting at the End of the Block" and the Sense of Entitlement	135
7	The Evil Eye: Envy and Begrudging the Passion of a New Beginning	159
8	Giving the Devil His Due: Spite and the Struggle for Individual Dignity	191
Part III	Psychotherapy: The Quest for Self-Acceptance
9	Bringing Heaven Down to Earth: The Idealizing Transference and the Search for a Powerful Other	213
10	Confidence and Doubt: The Therapist's Sense of Lovingness and the Use of the Personal in Psychotherapy	241
11	Haunting Echoes of Personal Truth: The Pangs of Regret and Remorse	267
12	Self-Acceptance and the Generosity of Letting Go: The Experiences of Mourning and Growth	293
	References	315
	Credits	325
	Index	327

Editorial Reviews

With Despair and the Return of Hope, Dr. Peter Shabad has masterfully crafted a richly textured, beautifully elegant work of art, a masterpiece that represents the culmination of years of clinical work and theoretical study. In a book that is at once inspired, inspiring, and poetic, Dr. Shabad has managed seamlessly to integrate the psychoanalytic and the existential. The result is a riveting volume whose pages are replete with clinically useful pearls of wisdom about life, death, and much that is in between. This is ultimately a story about transformation, forgiveness, and letting go; the development of the capacity to 'choose oneself' as one moves from disillusionment, hopelessness, and despair to freedom, hopefulness, and possibility. A must-read that you won't be able to put down until you've read every last word.

Martha Stark

Peter Shabad has written a book of large achievement. Despair and the Return of Hope is bound to usher in a new epoch in clinical discussions and debates about the problem of adapting to the facts of life. There are many reasons to applaud the author's accomplishments. I especially like his original clinical views on disillusionment (deep-seated negative illusions) and mourning (as distinguished from grief), and the refreshing ways he articulates complex ideas. Dr. Shabad walks comfortably and judiciously through the terrains of psychology, literature, philosophy, and popular culture. Mental health professionals will be impressed with his numerous and elegant clinical examples and his call for the use of the personal in psychotherapy. His treatise has broadened and deepened the therapeutic message. Dr. Shabad has written a book that sparkles with creativity as it scrutinizes the face of death.

Spyros D. Orfanos

Peter Shabad's remarkable new book reminds us of the reach and the resonance of the language of psychoanalysis at its best. His subject, in a sense, is the retreat from sociability; and his descriptions of what he calls the 'desperate morality of survival,' of the ways in which the troubled person cures himself by segregating his experience and then can't find a cure for his self cure, are among the most powerful in contemporary psychoanalysis. This is a book not merely for psychoanalysts, but for anyone interested in the roots of contemporary morality.

Adam Phillips

Shabad (clinical psychiatry, Northwestern U. Medical School) combines existential and psychoanalytic approaches in this exploration of "how our disillusionments and the walls that we resurrect to prevent a repeat of those experiences impede us from living fulfilled lives." He traces the stages of an individual's life, from innocence through disillusionment, and the ways in psychotherapy can be used by a patient to work through the subsequent stages of mourning and self- acceptance. The concepts are illustrated with numerous examples from Shabad's clinical experiences. The text is academic, but accessible to a general audience. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)