Relating to Self-Harm and Suicide

Relating to Self-Harm and Suicide presents original studies and research from contemporary psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and academics focusing on the psychoanalytic understanding of suicide and self-harm and how this can be applied to clinical work and policy. This book suggests that suicide and self-harm must be understood as having meaning within interpersonal and intrapsychic relationships, offering a new and more hopeful approach to prevention and recovery. Divided into three sections, this revised edition includes a theoretical overview and conceptual framework, psychoanalytic practice with self-harming and suicidal patients and applications of psychoanalytic thinking to suicide and self-harm prevention. Enriched with detailed examples illustrating this approach in a range of settings and with different groups and populations, this book offers an international perspective and contemporary understanding of psychoanalytic approaches to working with suicidal and self-harming people. This book will be helpful to psychoanalytic psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and other mental health professionals wanting to integrate psychoanalytic ideas into their work with self-harming and suicidal people. It will also be useful to academics, teachers, researchers and policymakers involved in suicide prevention.

Stephen Briggs, PhD, is an emeritus professor at the University of East London and an honorary professor at the Universities of Exeter and Nottingham. He is a member of the Tavistock Society of Psychotherapists and a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Alessandra Lemma is a fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society and a chartered clinical and counselling psychologist. She is also a visiting professor for the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London and a consultant at the Anna Freud Centre. William Crouch was a consultant clinical psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist in the NHS. He is a fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society and now works in private practice.

Part I: Conceptual Framework 1. Psychoanalysis and suicide: process and typology 2. The father transference during a pre-suicide state 3. Self break-up and the descent into suicide 4. Psychoanalysis and suicide: process and typology 5. A psychoanalytical approach to suicide in adolescents 6. Treatment priorities after adolescent suicide attempts 7. Mental pain, pain-producing constructs, the suicidal body, and suicide Part II: Psychoanalytic Practice 8. Hostility and suicide: the experience of aggression from within and without 9. Suicidal thoughts during an analysis 10. Suicidality and women: obsession and the use of the body 11. Hostility and suicide: the experience of aggression from within and without 12. Hostility and suicide: the experience of aggression from within and without Part III: Applications in practice, prevention and postvention 13. On suicide prevention in hospitals: empirical observations and psychodynamic thinking 14. On being affected without being infected: managing suicidal thoughts in student counselling 15. Suicidality in later life 16. Skin toughening and skin porosity: adressing the issue of self-harm by omission 17. Psychological safety: a missing concept in suicide risk prevention 18. Postvention: the impact of suicide and suicidal behaviour on adolescents and parents 19. The delusional narrative of suicide bereavement and the psychodynamics of suicide loss 20. Speaking with the Skin: Self Harm and its Meanings for Incarcerated Women 21. When gender is a carrier for the unbearable: Understanding suicidality in transgender individuals 22. Gay men and suicidality: the development and nature of the critical superego 23. Psychoanalytic understanding of the request for assisted suicide