Download Author: Scharff, David E., M.D.

David E. Scharff, M.D. is Chair of the Board, Co-Founder and Former Director, International Psychotherapy Institute; Chair, The International Psychoanalytic Association’s Working Group on Family and Couple Psychoanalysis; Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and Georgetown University; Supervising Analyst, International Institute for Psychoanalytic Training; Teaching Analyst, Washington Psychoanalytic Institute; Honorary Fellow, the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships, London; Former President, American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists, and former Vice-President, International Association for Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. He is a Child and Adult Analyst in Private Practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Educated at Yale, Harvard Medical School, The Tavistock Clinic and The Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, Dr. Scharff has been author and editor of more than 30 books, with foundational texts on family and couple and individual psychoanalytic therapy, the work of Ronald Fairbairn, sexual difficulty, and innovative training of psychotherapists and psychoanalysts. He has organized more than 100 conferences in the United States and abroad, and taught internationally on five continents including 28 countries. His recent initiatives have focused on teaching psychoanalytic couple and family therapy in China, where he has organized an innovative continuous training program for students from all across China and Taiwan. To this end he is founder of a journal devoted to the newly emergent field of psychoanalysis in China, called “Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in China.” At the same time as Chair of the Couple and Family Psychoanalysis Working Group of the International Psychoanalytic Association, he has, together with members of the group, organized meetings of the working group and international congresses that further the study of family and couple psychoanalysis around the world.

Recent publications in these areas have included “Psychoanalytic Couple Therapy” edited with Jill Scharff; “Fairbairn and the Object Relations Tradition,” edited with Graham Clarke; “Psychoanalysis in China,” edited with Sverre Varvin; and “The Interpersonal Unconscious,” written with Jill Scharff. Books in process include “Enrique Pichon Riviѐre: A Psychoanalytic Pioneer,” edited with Roberto Losso and Lea Setton; and “Family and Couple Psychoanalysis Around the World”, edited with Elizabeth Palacios.

15 eBooks available.

Refinding the Object and Reclaiming the Self

Refinding the Object and Reclaiming the Self is a groundbreaking study of the growth of the self out of the mutuality that lies at the heart of the therapeutic encounter. Applying an object relations perspective to individual psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, Dr. David Scharff constructs a rich theory of the self derived from individual, family, and marital therapy, groups, and mother-infant research. He applies this vision of a self composed of a network of internal and external object relations to a therapy based on the shared subjective experiences of patient and therapist.

At the heart of Scharff’s approach is a way of working in the area that is paradoxically both between therapist and patient and within each of them. He explores the ways in which patient and therapist communicate through complementary, resonating object relations systems, which each also remains firmly distinct in role and purpose.

Beginning with sessions from the opening phases of a psychoanalytic treatment, Scharff illustrates the interdependence of self and object, of patient and therapist, from the beginning. He spells out a major theoretical contribution of the book: that while both self and internal object are functions of an overarching self, the self alone is not the comprehensive unite of therapeutic consideration. Rather it is a self constructed out of a graduated and interlocking series of relationships. Placed between mirrors that face each other, we cannot conceive of ourselves without invoking the reflection of others’ gaze, body gestures, echoing sounds, and responsive expressions, even while we also reflect their selves.

The second section of the book develops these themes clinically, illustrating the use of projective and introspective identification in an extended couple assessment, the transformation of early memories and internal objects during individual psychotherapy, and the birth of a patient’s refund self in the analytic encounter. A third section develops a startling, original view of the dream as a communication between self and other in individual psychotherapy, and the birth of the patient’s refund self in the analytic encounter. A fourth and equally original section explores self and object relations from the vantage of family and mother-infant studies. The final section on clinical technique examines the role of the object relations of the therapist in individual therapy and psychoanalysis, ending with illustrations of therapeutic growth between patient and therapist during termination.

A master clinician and writer, David Scharff has given us a pathfinding study of the inexplicable relationship of self and object in development and in therapy.

Between Two Worlds: Aspects of the Transition from School to Work

This book presents research into the transition from school to work, and into career counseling as it affects the ‘non-academic’ child. The work was carried out over several years in the 1970s by John m. M. Hill, Psychoanalyst and Director of the Centre for Applied Social Research, and by David Scharff, MD, for the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, working under John Hill’s direction.

The study presented here arose through a growing awareness that the needs of young school leavers were not being matched by the right kind of help. While teachers, parents and children themselves recognized the crucial importance of this stage of life, support and guidance were too often inadequate, resulting in lack of confidence, anxiety and other forms of disturbance.

Between Two Worlds focuses on the dilemma of the non-academic adolescent through close work with schools, and a large number of clinical interviews with children and their families of those who were on track to leave school at the earliest legal opportunity. The book is saturated with a psychoanalytic developmental perspective that illuminates the challenges facing these non-academic children and their families as they face the wider world.

This reprinting of the book, originally published in 1976, is enhanced by two chapters written by Jill Savege Scharff about studies conducted in one of the schools being researched, which she conducted during the year following David Scharff’s studies. The book concludes with recommendations for enhanced teacher training in counselling and in human relationships and development; and for consultancy to schools in relevant curriculum design. It also explains implications of the research findings for the world of work. These many years later, with crises in higher education and in the transition to work for non-academic children, it remains essential reading for all those concerned with the vocational guidance of young people in schools, in community colleges and career counseling offices (917 pgs).

David E. Scharff, M.D. is Chair of the Board, Co-Founder and Former Director, International Psychotherapy Institute; Chair, The International Psychoanalytic Association’s Committee on Family and Couple Psychoanalysis; Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and Georgetown University; Supervising Analyst, International Institute for Psychoanalytic Training; Honorary Fellow, Tavistock Relationships, London; Former President, American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists, and former Vice-President, International Association for Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. He is an internationally known teaching, having taught and organized courses and conferences in 30 countries. He is a Child and Adult Analyst in Private Practice with children, adults, couples and families in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Dr. Scharff is author of more than 30 books and 80 articles, with important publications on family and couple therapy, psychoanalytic theory and history, and sex therapy. His earliest publications focused on the adolescent transition from school to work. This, his first book, published in the United Kingdom in 1976, on the subject of the transition from school to work, has been essentially unknown. Now, through freepsychotherapybooks.org it is available for those with interests in adolescent development, in education of adolescents, and in the entry of young people into the world of work.

Enrique Pichon Rivière: Pioneer of the Link

This book introduces the work of Enrique Pichon Rivière to an English-reading psychoanalytic audience, and then explores some of the many implications and developments of his groundbreaking work. This eBook follows the publication of the first group of articles on and by Enrique Pichon Rivière in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and the first collection of his writings in English as a print book, The Linked Self in Psychoanalysis: The Work of Enrique Pichon Rivière. (46 pp.)

The Psychoanalytic Century: Freud’s Legacy for the Future

The Psychoanalytic Century examines and celebrates Freud’s extraordinary influence on modern analysis and Western culture as a whole. The book comprehensively covers the evolution of our understanding of hysteria as the diagnostic entity through which Freud invented psychoanalysis, and the assessment of the contribution of Freud and his successors to the theory of love and clinical approaches to love relations, as well as to literature, the visual arts, international diplomacy, and race. In this volume we celebrate Freud’s legacy, and explore the scope of his impact on psychoanalysis, society, and culture. The contributions of many distinguished colleagues follow the evolution of analysis as his ideas move beyond historical artifact to become living internal objects, embedded in Western culture.(440 pp.)

Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society

Panel discussion on a video case presentation of an African-American woman artist who spoke of her own struggles and those of her family with race, and of her difficulties in loving. This presentation had the purpose of lending a tangible clinical example to the issues of creativity and the uses of art, psychoanalytic explorations of problems in loving, and the effects of race on the individual and the culture. There was also a jointly authored paper read by Paula Ellman, Ph.D., “The Riddle of Femininity” written by a study group of women analysts, which explored the application of the two concepts of “primary femininity and the castration complex in the clinical treatment of women.” The paper described a woman who used phallic identifications as a defense to deal with her developmentally compromised feminine identification.

Freud in Our Time

Freud’s work emerges as monumental: a climate of opinion, a body of probing, beautifully written thought that is an enduring source of understanding of the human condition.