Psychodynamic Formulation

Features

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. Review: This informative, thoughtfully organized, Cleary writtenbook addresses a central topic that is being ever more exiled intothe shadows of psychiatric knowledge and practice. (Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 1 December 2014) This is the best book I have read on psychodynamicformulation.

Clearly written, with a warm, conversationalstyle and numerous clinical examples, this book shows the readerhow centrally important a psychodynamic formulation is tounderstanding the patient and guiding the treatment not justin psychotherapy but in all clinical settings. Theauthors systematically guide the reader in developing skills andbuilding knowledge to construct a psychodynamic formulation andthinking deeply about patients.

It is the most comprehensiveand accessible learning guide on psychodynamic formulation todate! (Debra Katz,Vice Chair for Education at theUniversity of Kentucky and Director of Psychiatry ResidencyTraining, USA) This highly anticipated companion text to PsychodynamicPsychotherapy: A Clinical Manual provides a sophisticated yeteasily understandable approach to developing psychodynamicformulations, one of the most challenging and important aspects oflearning psychodynamic psychotherapy.

Cabaniss and hercoauthors understand how to present the complex world ofpsychodynamic psychotherapy and formulation in a way that beginningstudents can grasp and apply to their clinical work withpatients. The system of developing formulations(Describe-Review-Link) provides focus, clarity and the flexibilityto create meaningful ways of understanding our patients that willbe of great benefit to both beginners and skilled clinicians.

This book is a great advance in the way to approach developing theformulations that are the bedrock of well conceivedtreatment. (David A. Goldberg, M.DCalifornia Pacific Medical Center, San Francisco, USA)