In this volume, we explore what it is to live through trauma while experiencing huge losses that threaten our well-being. The book demonstrates how clinicians can help patients regain meaning and purpose once again.
The authors in these chapters sensitively annotate their therapeutic journeys with their patients, all of whom grapple with extremely difficult emotional conditions. There is much that can be learned about going-on-being from psychoanalysts, who have always worked in the depth of the unconscious psychic dimension. The authors focus on the psychic processes, the core experiences, and the qualities of selfhood that help to move the human soul through despair on to hope and new beginnings. Rich clinical vignettes illustrate these ideas in a way that is sure to help clinicians and other readers face and work with their own and others’ places of pain and challenge.
We have all been shaken by the winds of unsettling social and political change over the past few years; hence this book will appeal to a wide audience. Psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, clinical social workers, counselors, students and others in the helping professions will find this book essential reading, as will members of the wider public who have experienced challenges in their own or their loved one’s “going-on-being”.
'Winnicott’s concept of “going-on-being” has been influential, but it has not received detailed and in-depth treatment – until now. In this excellent, wide ranging, and timely book, a diverse and talented group of psychoanalytic authors relate going-on-being to loss, mourning, trauma, social upheaval, and much else. This book is an essential resource for the clinician, those interested in psychoanalytic theory, and anyone else interested in the human condition.'
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Joseph Fernando, M.D. Training Analyst, Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis. Director, Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis; author of “A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Trauma: Post-Traumatic Mental Functioning, the Zero Process, and the Construction of Reality.”
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For more about this work, please go to:
Joint International Conference: Collected Papers
Many of the Joint International Conferences have inspired a book of collected papers based on the conference presentations.
Following the 2023 conference in Naxos, Michelle Flax, PhD and Gail White, PhD spearheaded the creation of and edited:
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Going on Being in Challenging Times: Psychoanalytic Reflections
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ASPP congratulates the editors and all the chapter authors on this work's 2025 publication, including the following ASPP members:
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Melinda Blitzer PhD: Taking Sides: Managing Strong Countertransference Feelings in Couple Therapy
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Alexia Camfield LCSW: Potential Space in the Uncertainty of the Pandemic
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Ionas Sapountzis PhD: Philoctetes at 11am
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Burton Seitler PhD: So Close and Yet so Far Away: Psychoanalytic Treatment and Recovery from Psychosis Inducing Trauma
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Amira Simha-Alpern PhD & Ionas Sapountzis PhD: Striving to Create a Safe Space in an Unsafe World: Responding to Students’ Needs in the Days After October 7th
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Elizabeth B. Sullivan LCSW-R: Free to Mourn and Mourning to be Free
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Brent Willock PhD: Living atop archaic agonies: Treating Children Suffering from Early Trauma & I Rage, Therefore I am​