Touch Papers

Out of all medical and therapeutic treatments, psychoanalysis remains one of the very few that uses no physical contact. Sigmund Freud stopped using the "pressure technique" in the late 1890s, a technique in which he would press lightly on his patient's head while insisting that they remember forgotten events. Today, touch remains virtually non-existent in adult psychoanalysis.

For the first time, this book explores the controversial issue of physical contact in the consulting room. The contributors—psychoanalysts and psychotherapists representing a diverse range of psychoanalytic viewpoints—focus on the unconscious meanings of touch, absence of touch, unwelcome touch, or "accidental" touch in the psychoanalytic clinical situation. There are plenty of clinical vignettes and the discussions are grounded in clinical experience, offering a range of very different opinions on this much-neglected subject.

This is a book for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and all readers interested in this issue.

Contributors include Brett Kahr, A. H. Brafman, Camilla Bosanquet, Valerie Sinason, Pearl King, Nicola Diamond, Em Farrell, Maria Emilia Pozzi, Robert Langs, Nick Totton, Emma Ramsden, Angela Pryor, Sarita Bose, Sharmila Charles, Gwen Adshead. With a foreword by Susie Orbach.

Graeme Galton is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in the National Health Service and in private practice. At the Parkside Clinic in London he works with individuals and groups in an NHS outpatient psychotherapy service. He also works at the Clinic for Dissociative Studies, a small specialist outpatient mental health service for people suffering from severe trauma and dissociation. He is a Registered Member of the Centre for Attachment-based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, where he teaches on the clinical training programme. He is also a visiting tutor at the School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, Regent's College, London.