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.

48 eBooks available.

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.

The Therapist’s Internal Objects

“Arguably the finest contemporary teachers of object relations theory.” –Christopher Bollas
“Their work is at every turn firmly grounded in richly personal clinical discussions in which the complex experience of being with patients under a very wide range of circumstances is powerfully conveyed and thoughtfully considered.”–Thomas H. Ogden (17 pp.)


This ebook is an excerpt from Object Relations Individual Therapy © 2000 Jason Aronson, Inc. used by arrangement with the publisher. Purchase a print version of this book here.

Towards the Interpersonal Unconscious

Through case studies and examples, Jill and David Scharff explain the development of their ideas over the last 30 years, including: psychoanalysis, child and adolescent therapy, family therapy, sex therapy, group therapy, group relations, attachment research, infant observation, trauma, applied chaos theory, and link theory. (423 pp.)