Sex Addiction and Supervision: Vamik Volkan's New Book

Last summer I was delighted to be able to learn the internationally renowned psychoanalytic scholar and psychiatrist Vamik Volkan. You can read that interview here. 

He e-mailed me yesterday to say he has a new book out: Sexual Addiction: Psychoanalytic Concepts and the Art of Supervision (Phoenix Publishing, 2021). 

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Vamık D. Volkan recounts the story of Judy, a woman attempting to solve her early life deprivations through non-chemical addiction. He provides an understanding of the psychology behind such an addiction and also illustrates pertinent therapeutic concepts and issues which arose in Judy’s case. These include built-in transference, twinning, interpretation, dreams, hoarding, acting out, and therapeutic play. By paying attention to such things, it is possible to gain a greater understanding of the internal worlds of patients with preoedipal deprivations, conflicts, and fixations.

For this case, Dr Volkan undertook the role of supervisor to an analyst in training. The topics of the psychoanalytic supervisor–supervisee relationship and the supervisor’s emotional reactions toward the patient, whom the supervisor never meets, are rather ignored in the psychoanalytic literature. This book gives an open and frank overview of the relationship, reporting not only what was said but also what lay behind the words.

Written in Dr Volkan’s characteristically accessible style, this book will be enjoyed equally by those under supervision as those providing it, and provides an excellent overview of work with addiction.

The publisher also provides the table of contents and introduction to the book here.