Customer Reviews

Standing in the Spaces: Essays on Clinical Process Trauma and Dissociation

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To read Bromberg is to be invited into the mind of one of the most sophisticated analytic clinicians writing today. His writings style wonderfully conveys the subtle, barely thinkable complexities of clinical process, those hardly noticeable contours of interpersonal meaning shaping the feel of a given moment in a session. Bromberg is able to put into words what all therapists have experienced but few have been able to describe. Although the more abstract theoretical components of his thinking are not quite as coherent as one might wish (a lot of model-mixing here) this flaw becomes almost insignificant in the face of the scintillating brilliance of Bromberg's clinical insight.

What I find most helpful is the attention he pays to constructing the ability to hold paradox... to stand in many spaces and know several truths at the same time. Assisting clients to grow this capacity, this architecture, to hold without collapse, is one of the most fundamental of my tasks.

My attention was drawn to Dr. Bromberg and to this book by references in the current literature on trauma and dissociation, most notably dissociative identity disorder (DID). It is a rare pleasure to read a psychoanalyst who not only "understands" dissociation in theory, but sees it, hears it, feels it, knows it in clinical practice. Being aware of his own dissociation enables him to work with it not just in his clients with DID, but in all his clients, including the "ordinary" ones and those with severe personality disorders (borderline, narcissistic, schizoid). I was fascinated by his concept that dissociative processes, normal and not, create personality structure, and that all the borderline, narcissistic, and schizoid personality disorders are disorders of personality structure. Many readers, therapists and clients alike, know from first hand experience that effective treatment of DID involves profound changes of personality structure; this book provides glimpses of these changes happening inside a client, as seen by a therapist.

This work is at the edge of whatever is culmination in psychoanalysis.
Dense and sometime a mind twister it is a profound and human journey as the author's title says "Standing in the spaces"
Bromberg his pushing and moving psychoanalysis straight forward.He is part of those guys that makes the world progress.
A compelling must read "ouvrage" for all clinicians...A Brilliant moving book

What a fascinating and remarkable book. Bromberg's subtlety, ingenuity and insight combine in -- how rare!--elegantly accessible prose to produce a book full of ideas. I found it luminous and richly rewarding.