Seeing and being seen

Seeing and Being Seen: Emerging from a Psychic Retreat is the second book by John Steiner to be translated into Czech (the first monograph was the successful Psychic Retreats: Pathological Organisations in Psychotic, Neurotic and Borderline Patients, Triton, 2018). In it, Steiner examines those situations in clinical work where the patient feels they are at a dead end and the analytical process is at risk of failure. This occurs when leaving the protection of the psychic retreat, where they must face new anxieties and complications.
The book is divided into three parts, covering topics such as shame, embarrassment and humiliation, helplessness, power and dominance, mourning, melancholia, and the compulsion to repeat. The clear formulations and writing style, based primarily on clinical work, convey to the reader the depth of the author's insight, his sensitivity, and his genuine concern for his patients. Steiner's creative and integrative efforts allow for new perspectives based on the previous contributions of psychoanalysts including Freud, Klein, Rosenfeld, and Bion. The book is sure to be of interest to psychoanalysts, clinical psychotherapists, and all those interested in psychoanalysis.
Honorary Member of the Czech Psychoanalytical Society, John Steiner is one of the great figures of world psychoanalysis. He has long served as a training and supervising analyst for the British Psychoanalytical Society and currently still supervises, lectures, and writes. Steiner's contribution to psychoanalysis is reflected not only in his publications, but also in the fact that his concepts, such as “pathological organisation of personality”, “psychic retreats”, “emerging from a psychic retreat”, “seeing and being seen”, and “patient-centred and analyst-centred interpretations”, have become a common part of analytical terminology. In addition to authoring the books translated into Czech, he is the editor of several professional publications and the author of numerous clinical papers published in the professional journal IJPA. His latest book is entitled Illusion, Disillusion, and Irony in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2020).