Dramatic Dialogue: Contemporary Clinical Practice - Galit Atlas and Lewis Aron

In Dramatic Dialogue, Atlas and Aron develop the metaphors of drama and theatre to introduce a new way of thinking about therapeutic action and therapeutic traction. This model invites the patient’s many self-states and the numerous versions of the therapist’s self onto the analytic stage to dream a mutual dream and live together the past and the future, as they appear in the present moment. The book brings together the relational emphasis on multiple self-states and enactment with the Bionian conceptions of reverie and dreaming-up the patient.

The term Dramatic Dialogue originated in Ferenczi’s clinical innovations and refers to the patient and therapist dramatizing and dreaming-up the full range of their multiple selves. Along with Atlas and Aron, readers will become immersed in a Dramatic Dialogue, which the authors elaborate and enact, using the contemporary language of multiple self-states, waking dreaming, dissociation, generative enactment, and the prospective function.

The book provides a rich description of contemporary clinical practice, illustrated with numerous clinical tales and detailed examination of clinical moments. Inspired by Bion’s concept of "becoming-at-one" and "at-one-ment,"　the authors call for a return of the soul or spirit to psychoanalysis and the generative use of the analyst’s subjectivity, including a passionate use of mind, body and soul in the pursuit of psychoanalytic truth. 

Publisher: Routledge

Published: November 2017

Format: Paperback

Pages: 194

Dimensions: 15.6 x 1.12 x 23.39 cm