Book Celebration Virtual Party

This 7^th book of Dr. Kavaler-Adler is a highly clinical collection, with 22 chapters taken from Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s published journal articles and edited book chapters. All chapters have case studies, most of which demonstrate the progressive developmental growth in those who began treatment at the level of pre-symbolic functioning and evolved to symbolic functioning, to whole-object relations, to full subjectivity, as well as to the progressive road towards the capacity to negotiate psychic conflict, psychic dialectic, and the resolution of primal trauma.

Whatever terrain of development is explicated in all these transformative clinical papers, and whether dealing with erotic transference as a transitional object experience, or complex group process in the face of powerful regret and powerful yearning for connection; and whether dreams or fantasies, or analyst-patient dialogues are psycho-dynamically articulated; the road to empathy, compassion, interiority, self-reflection, and psychic dialectic is washed over by the birth of the affect states of rage, grief, and mourning.

The churning confusion of love and hate pulsates through the crystalline transference and  countertransference interactions as developmental mourning transforms developmental arrest.    From the woman who cried “My graduation is my mother’s funeral,” to the hauntingly remembered ghost of the mother lost, to the multi-levels of mother-father within the “pivotal moments of surrender to mourning internal parental objects,” the road through “developmental mourning” is a complex avenue of despair turning to hope.

Please join us to immerse ourselves in this rich panorama. We welcome your questions, comments, and thoughts. The panelists will each choose to focus on themes in the book that are of particular interest to them. After each panelist speaks, we will engage in discussion.