Charles C. McCormack - Reviews
"This spellbinding volume represents the accumulated wisdom of a gifted therapist who has developed an extraordinarily effective treatment approach to working with couples who have personality disorders, one that seamlessly integrates the interpersonal with the intrapsychic. A highly original and creative thinker, McCormack has synthesized the contributions of object relations theorists like Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Ogden to inform his understanding of, and approach to, these difficult and complex patients. Respectfully framing their unrelenting provocativeness as a desperate attempt to extract from the object (be it partner or therapist) a means of healing past unresolved traumas, the author encourages the therapist to put forth, for mutual observation and understanding, the countertransferential responses these patients elicit. McCormack's extensive use of clinical vignettes to illustrate his treatment method demonstrates that we are dealing with a master clinician who, with humility and compassion, is able to go where other therapists, less wise and courageous, fear to tread. Inspired and inspiring, this important book should be required reading for any practitioner who works with personality-disordered patients."
Martha Stark, M.D. Author: "Working with Resistance" and "Modes of Therapeutic Action."
"A therapist's faithful companion along a hard road, this book guides us toward finding a much wider scope for using ourselves as therapeutic instruments. It is that rarity, a 'how to' book that is also a 'why to' book, one that makes clear how ultimate the stakes are in therapy. McCormack's writing lives because he has lived what he writes. His anecdotes surge off the page, sometimes so charged with the elemental pain of being a person that it takes your breath away. He asks deep questions about the rules of engagement with couples in trouble and troubles in couples. This is a book to live with, to learn from, and to lean on."
Roger A. Lewin, M.D. Author: "Creative collaboration in Psychotherapy."
"This book is a gift to all therapists who battle to help seriously disturbed couples...Throughout, McCormack's own struggle to help patients grow, rather than destroy what they hold most dear, is the integrating force... It offers a lighthouse on the path to therapeutic survival and safe harbor."
David Scharff, M.D. Co-Director, Internations Institute of Object Relations Therapy
"McCormack's warmth, genuineness and compassion both for his patients and for the emotionally strenuous nature of the therapist’s work shines through his writing. This makes for a particularly supportive stance to those who conduct or are thinking about expanding their practice to include psychoanalytic work with couples. McCormack minces no words in showing that the greatest challenge of couples work is that it requires the therapist to contain traumatic and primitive emotional states, states that can evoke unresolved, primitive and chaotic aspects of the therapist’s relational world and guilt charged memories of the therapist’s own misbehavior in intimate relationships. In an even larger sense this book offers encouragement about the shared human journey towards greater subjectivity which McCormack describes as becoming more able to think thoughts and feel feelings, to approach the “never-ending road of growing up” with a spirit of mystery and curiosity and to assume greater responsibility (tempered by realism) for the choices with which we shape our lives. Regardless of whether one works with couples or only with individuals, with severely disordered or relatively neurotic clientele, or whether one is looking for insight into oneself and relationships, there is something here to inform and enrich the repertoire of every psychotherapist."
Stuart Hockenberry, PsyD and Andrea Katin, MSW, J.D. are both in private practice in the Philadelphia area. They are also board members of the Philadelphia Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology, a local chapter of Division 39.