Full Description
How do our patients come to be the way they are?
What forces shape their conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings?
How can we use this information to best help them?
Constructing psychodynamic formulations is one of the best ways for mental health professionals to answer questions like these. It can help clinicians in all mental health setting understand their patients, set treatment goals, choose therapeutic strategies, construct meaningful interventions and conduct treatment.
Despite the centrality of psychodynamic formulation to our work with patients, few students are taught how to construct them in a clear systematic way. This book offers students and practitioners from all fields of mental health a clear, practical, operationalized method for constructing psychodynamic formulations, with an emphasis on the following steps:
DESCRIBING problems and patterns
REVIEWING the developmental history
LINKING problems and patterns to history using organizing ideas about development.
The unique, up-to-date perspective of this book integrates psychodynamic theories with ideas about the role of genetics, trauma, and early cognitive and emotional difficulties on development to help clinicians develop effective formulations.
Psychodynamic Formulation is written in the same clear, concise style of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: A Clinical Manual (Wiley 2011). It is reader friendly, full of useful examples, eminently practical, suitable for either classroom or individual use, and applicable for all mental health professionals. It can stand alone or be used as a companion volume to the Clinical Manual.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi
PART ONE Introduction to the Psychodynamic Formulation 1
1 What is a Psychodynamic Formulation? 3
2 How do We Use Psychodynamic Formulations? 8
3 How do We Construct a Psychodynamic Formulation? 12
PART TWO DESCRIBE 17
4 Self 23
5 Relationships 32
6 Adapting 41
7 Cognition 52
8 Work and Play 61
Putting it Together - A Description of Problems and Patterns 69
PART THREE REVIEW 75
9 What We're Born with - Genetics and Prenatal Development 81
10 The Earliest Years 90
11 Middle Childhood 101
12 Later Childhood, Adolescence, and Adulthood 113
Putting it Together - A Developmental History 123
PART FOUR LINK 135
13 Trauma 143
14 Early Cognitive and Emotional Difficulties 152
15 Conflict and Defense 163
16 Relationships with Others 173
17 The Development of the Self 182
18 Attachment 191
Putting it Together-A Psychodynamic Formulation 201
PART FIVE Psychodynamic Formulations in Clinical Practice 213
19 Psychodynamic Formulations in Acute Care Settings 215
20 Psychodynamic Formulation in Pharmacologic Treatment 222
21 Psychodynamic Formulation in Long-Term Psychodynamic
Psychotherapy: Revising Over Time 230
22 Sharing Formulations with Our Patients 238
Epilogue 247
Appendix - How to Use Psychodynamic Formulation: A Guide for Educators 249
Recommended Reading 253
Index 259
