A workshop model for educating medical practitioners about optimal treatment of difficult-to-manage patients: utilization of transference-countertransference.

Some patients are unable to participate in a good, mutually cooperative relationship with their primary care doctors. They may have long-standing psychosocial difficulties exacerbated by chronic, painful, or life-threatening illnesses. Some may have somatic symptoms that they define as evidence only of an identified illness but which are reflections of psychic misery with roots in their thoughts, feelings, and relationships.

Mysteries of the void: an analyst's view of female urination.

Anxiety, shame, guilt, and depression accompany the absence or loss of urinary sphincter control at both ends of the life cycle. The economic costs are high when one reflects that incontinence limits access to child-care facilities and thus the mothers return to gainful employment. It is often the prime reason for admission to nursing home care for the grandmother.

Pregnancy as a reaction to early childhood sibling loss.

Surrogate mothers, illegitimately pregnant teenagers, married women seeking abortions, women convicted of manslaughter, and sister survivors of early childhood sibling loss may share a common conflict. These women may be in a state of incomplete mourning, unconsciously wishing to master a trauma by turning a passive experience into a life event they can control. Pregnancy can function as that life event.

Community parental surrogates and their role for the adolescent.

Community parental surrogates and their role for the adolescent is explored against the backdrop of classical psychoanalytic theory, self-psychology, and the sociological prevalence of one-parent families. The rabbi/tutor and coach/umpire help resolve oedipal issues and promote the establishment of a cohesive self. Clinical vignettes illustrate how de-idealization by proxy may aid detachment from childhood love-objects and allow healthy partial identification with the same-sex parent.