BOOKS
CREATIVE REPETITION AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY
Contemporary Freudian Explorations of Trauma, Memory, and Clinical Process
Creative Repetition and Intersubjectivity looks at contemporary Freudian and post-Freudian theory through an intersubjective lens. Bruce Reis offers views on how psychoanalytic conceptions from the last century uniquely manifest in the consulting rooms of this century – how analytic technique has radically evolved through developing Freud’s original insights into dreaming, and hallucinosis; and how the presentation of today’s analysands calls for analyst’s use of themselves in unprecedented new ways.
Taking up bedrock analytic concepts such as the death instinct, repetition, trauma and the place of speech and of silence, Reis brings a diversely inspired, twenty-first-century analytic sensibility to his reworking of these concepts and illustrates them clinically in a process-oriented approach. Here the unconscious intersubjective relation takes on transformative power, resulting in the analyst’s experience of hybridized chimerical monsters, creative seizures, reveries and intuitions that inform clinical realities outside of verbal or conscious discourse -- where change occurs in analysis.
Drawing on an unusually broad selection of major international influences, Creative Repetition and Intersubjectivity will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists across the schools of thought.
Jonathan Lear, The University of Chicago, USA:
"Graceful. Poised. Accepting. Poetic. Generous. Open to life's mysteries. These are thoughts that circulated through my mind as I read Bruce Reis' marvelous, monstrous, zombie-filled book. Here is an author who can make the death drive seductive. Reis extends a heartfelt welcome to his patients, to other psychoanalysts working in the field and to his readers. His review of the literature is remarkable for its compassion and insight into the thoughts of others. His clinical vignettes beautifully illuminate worlds of being together. For anyone who wants to grasp the vibrant realm of intersubjective psychoanalysis this is a wonderful book."
Click HERE to listen to the New Book Network's interview with Bruce Reis
Contemporary Perspectives from Psychoanalytic Gender Theory
Co-Edited by Bruce Reis and Robert Grossmark
In recent years there have been substantial changes in approaches to how genders are made and what functions genders fulfill. Most of the scholarly focus in this area has been in the areas of feminist, gay, and lesbian studies, and heterosexual masculinity - which tended to be defined by lack and absence - has not received the critical and scholarly attention these other areas have received. Heterosexual Masculinities rethinks a psychoanalytic tradition that has long thought of masculinity as a sort of brittle defense against femininity, softness, and emotionality. Reflecting current trends in psychoanalytic thinking, this book seeks to understand heterosexual masculinity as fluid, multiple, and emergent. The contributors to this insightful volume take new perspectives on relations between men, men’s positions as fathers in relation to their sons and daughters, the clinical encounter with heterosexual men, the social contexts of masculinity, and the multiplicity of heterosexual masculine subjectivities. What to a previous generation would have appeared as pathological or defensive, we now encounter as forms of masculine subjectivity that include wishes for intimacy, receptivity, and surrender, alongside ambition and the pleasures of "phallic narcissism."
Andrew Samuels, Professor of Analytical Psychology,
University of Essex, UK:
“This erudite, compassionate and beautifully edited collection is going to be a benchmark for the engagement of psychoanalysis with the masculinities. Many clinicians are all at sea with the men in their practices. We need authors like these who can, with elegance and punch, traverse gender, cultural and queer studies, balancing the intrapsychic and social dimensions of the work, knowing when that distinction breaks down. Poetically, here's a confirmation of masculinity as a metaphor of being and experiencing for all. Politically, here's a contribution from the clinic to healing a world whose problems reflect those of the men who run it."
BOOK CHAPTERS
Reis, B.E. (2022). The play of Eros: The story of an adolescent boy, his body, and his analyst’s body. In: Braving the Erotic Field in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Children and Adolescents. Ed. M.T. Brady. New York: Routledge, pp. 153-160.
Reis, B.E. (2022). Credo quia absurdum. In: Psychoanalytic Credos: Personal and Professional Journeys of Psychoanalysts. Ed. J. Salberg. New York: Routledge, pp. 184-190.
Reis, B.E. (2010). Afterwardness and Termination. In: J. Salberg (Ed.) Relational Perspectives on Termination. New York: Routledge, pp. 213-222.
Levin, P. & Reis, B.E. (1997), The use of the Rorschach in assessing trauma. In: Assessing Psychological Trauma and PTSD: A Practitioners Handbook, ed. J. Wilson & T. Keane. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 529-543.
Reis, B.E. (1995), Toward a psychoanalytic understanding of multiple personality disorder. In: Diagnosis and Treatment of Dissociative Disorders. Northvale, NJ: Aronson, pp. 25-35.
Reis, B.E. (1995), Time: The missing dimension in traumatic memory and dissociative subjectivity. In: Sexual Abuse Recalled: Treating Trauma in the Era of the Recovered Memory Debate, ed. J. Alpert. Northvale, NJ: Aronson, pp. 215-233.
