Download Author: Lachkar, Joan, Ph.D.

Joan Jutta Lachkar, Ph.D., is a licensed marriage and family therapist in private practice in Sherman Oaks, California, and is an instructor and affiliate member at the New Center for Psychoanalysis. She is the author of numerous books and publications, including her groundbreaking book The Narcissistic/Borderline Couple: Psychoanalytic Perspective on Marital Treatment. Dr. Lachkar is also a psychohistorian and has published many articles on marital and political conflict. She was one of the first psychotherapists to apply an object relational approach to marital therapy.

Born in Breslau, Germany, a daughter of Holocaust survivors, Dr. Lachkar was raised in Los Angeles, where she received her primary degrees in Education at USC and UCLA. She continued her graduate work at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology and International College.

The Narcissistic/Borderline Couple

“This is a highly well thought out work characterized by sound scholarship, considerable clinical experience, and innovativeness to be recommended to all mental health workers. It highlights Dr. Lachkar’s meticulous ongoing efforts to define a fascinating clinical entity from different clinical and theoretical vantage points.”

James Grotstein, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry, UCLA School of Medicine

Common Complaints in Couple Therapy

“Lachkar offers us a treasure trove of insight and interventions as she delineates communicative patterns across the globe within a dyadic context. She introduces original concepts like the ‘v spot’ (the point of our greatest vulnerability). Within the radical change in the nation’s demography, she offers the ‘cultural ear’ for discerning cultural rationalization from neurotic conflicts. Her writing is firmly anchored in theory and yet eminently accessible to readers at all levels of experience.”

Salman Ashtar, M.D. Jefferson University

3 eBooks available.

How to Talk to an Obsessive-Compulsive Personality

The major thrust of this book is to help therapists, patients, and others who interact not only with those who have a personality disorder like OCPD but also for those living in an interpersonal world—for example, dealing with a disgruntled neighbor. Throughout this text, including the cases, there are examples of how the specific communication styles of the Language of Empathology and the Language of Dialectics have applicability to the obsessive-compulsive, in order to meet and match their repetitive behaviors and paranoid anxiety regarding cleanliness and perfection.

 

New Approaches to Marital Therapy: The Dance, the Bond, the Drama

This ebook draws from numerous articles and books including materials from Lachkar’s forthcoming book, How to Talk to a Narcissist (2nd Edition. New York. Taylor and Francis). It defines a beleaguered type of relationship between two developmentally arrested people who consciously and unconsciously stir up highly charged feelings that fulfill many early unresolved conflicts characterized by their painful interactions. Together they enter into a psychological drama with interactions that are painful, on-going, circular, without reaching conflict resolution. The revelation is that each partner needs the other to play out his or her own personal drama embedded in old sentiments projected into their current relationship. The psychodynamics of the couple along with three phases of treatment are integrated to an effective approach in the conjoint treatment of marital pathology. Living in an ever changing world this revision would not be complete without addressing cross-cultural relationships, dealing with high conflict disordered couples in the court system, and of course the defenses that keep couples away from love, intimacy and romance. (115 pgs)