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Inner Strengths

Contemporary Psychotherapy and Hypnosis for Ego-strengthening

• No Author/Editor data available

• Price: $55.00
• Binding: Hardback
• Pages: 416
• Published by: Routledge
• Publication Date: 1st November 1998
• ISBN: 978-0-8058-2573-2

About the Book

However it is conceived and described by psychotherapists with different orientations, a stronger ego is a universally-acknowledged goal of therapeutic work. Inner Strengths is the first book to meet the need for a comprehensive treatment of approaches to ego-strengthening in psychotherapy. It provides contemporary psychodynamic, object relations, self-psychology, ego state, and transpersonal theoretical models for understanding how and why ego-strengthening occurs.

The authors are experienced psychotherapists who integrate hypnosis into their own practice of psychotherapy. They have been active in developing the newer, projective-evocative ego-strengthening techniques emphasizing the utilization of patients' inner resources. They survey the history of ego-strengthening efforts and show how that which has been considered intrinsically hypnotic connects with the great traditions of psychotherapy. Additionally, they offer step-by-step instructions for a diversity of ego-strengthening methods that can be used for patient self-care, internal boundary formation, and personality maturation in a wide range of clinical conditions. Their discussion of the fundamental concepts of ego-strengthening draws on their theoretical and clinical explorations of dynamic internal resources such as memory, strength, wisdom, self-soothing, and love. Throughout the book, theory is balanced by an unusual richness of extended clinical examples and a wide variety of practical ego-strengthening scripts.

Clinicians need not be trained in hypnosis to find Inner Strengths clarifying and helpful reading; the fundamental points so vividly made by the authors are relevant to many nonhypnotic-therapeutic interventions and issues.

Table of Contents

Contents: S.G. Gilligan, Foreword. J.G. Watkins, H.H. Watkins, Foreword. Preface. Ego-Strengthening: The Therapeutic Tradition. Ego-Strengthening: The Classical Hypnotic Tradition. Ego-Strengthening: The Ericksonian Tradition. The Ego-State Model in Hypnotic and Nonhypnotic Psychotherapy. The Utilization of Time as a Vehicle for Projective/Evocative Ego-Strengthening. The Ego: Its Composition. Internal Self-Soothing and the Development of the Self. Inner Love: Projective/Evocative Ego-Strengthening With Inner Resources of Love. Good Fences Make Good Neighbors: Internal Boundary Formation. Other Projective/Evocative Techniques. Ego-Strengthening in the Treatment of Performance Anxiety. Ego-Strengthening in the Treatment of Complex Clinical Syndromes. Ego-Strengthening With Posttraumatic and Dissociative Disorders I: Overview, Stabilization, and the Repair of Developmental Deficits. Ego-Strengthening With Posttraumatic and Dissociative Disorders II: Uncovering and Integration. The Strengthened Ego and the Transpersonal Self in Living and Dying.