Systems and Psychoanalysis

de Carmel Flaskas, David Pocock

This intellectually rigorous and generative collection of papers, positioned at the intersection of systemic and psychoanalytic therapy, captures the potential synergy of bringing these two honoured traditions back into dialogue, on new terms. The editors do partisans of both fields a great service in this effort, since their long-standing mutual isolation has kept each dismissive of the other, and ignorant of developments in the other's field - to their mutual detriment. The book tracks the ways in which innovative systemic practitioners are creatively reassembling the clinical and intellectual lineaments of psychodynamic and systems thinking in their work. While the strategies are many and varied, the collection as a whole reflects some of the deepest ideals and practices of both traditions at their best: holding complexity, tolerating contradiction, seeking common ground, seeing past limiting and ideologically driven binaries, thinking and working outside the box, and honouring history and tradition, even while digging it up.