In Dramatic Dialogue, Atlas and Aron develop the metaphors of drama and theatre to introduce a new way of thinking about therapeutic action and therapeutic traction. This model invites the patient's many self-states and the numerous versions of the therapist's self onto the analytic stage to dream a mutual dream and live together the past and the future, as they appear in the present moment. The book brings together the relational emphasis on multiple self-states and enactment with the Bionian conceptions of reverie and dreaming-up the patient.
The term Dramatic Dialogue originated in Ferenczi's clinical innovations and refers to the patient and therapist dramatizing and dreaming-up the full range of their multiple selves. Along with Atlas and Aron, readers will become immersed in a Dramatic Dialogue, which the authors elaborate and enact, using the contemporary language of multiple self-states, waking dreaming, dissociation, generative enactment, and the prospective function.
The book provides a rich description of contemporary clinical practice, illustrated with numerous clinical tales and detailed examination of clinical moments. Inspired by Bion's concept of "becoming-at-one" and "at-one-ment," the authors call for a return of the soul or spirit to psychoanalysis and the generative use of the analyst's subjectivity, including a passionate use of mind, body and soul in the pursuit of psychoanalytic truth. Dramatic Dialogue will be of great interest to all psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.
'In this brilliant book, Atlas and Aron have done nothing less than shift the ground under our feet.In one fell swoop, the commodious metaphor of "dramatic dialogue," adopted from Ferenczi and then turned to wider use, makes it possible for the authors to see and describe commonalities among clinical and intellectual contributions that have often been considered incommensurable.In illuminating a whole new approach to the problem of psychoanalytic pluralism, and in a lucid, clinically rich text that covers an enormous range of ideas, Atlas and Aron are opening ?a door to the psychoanalysis of the future.'-Donnel Stern, Ph.D., Training and Supervising Analyst, William Alanson White Institute, Clinical Consultant and Faculty, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. 'Immensely compelling and clinically useful, Dramatic Dialogue beautifully demonstrates the necessary integration of the enacted relationship and its symbolic contents. Brilliantly argued, this book is both an exciting revision of psychoanalysis and a renewal of its foundations as a practice of desire: one in which revelations of the past are nothing less than harbingers of transformation, in which we find the interactive dimension of shared feeling to be a continual wellspring of healing.'-Jessica Benjamin, author ofBeyond Doer and Done To.
