Short description:
This book defines in a clear and compelling manner the most fundamental and treacherous of transference phenomena, emotional experiences retained from the first few months of life .  Hedges takes the position that most negative therapeutic reactions resulting in premature terminations, malpractice suits, and complaints against therapist to licensing boards and ethics committees can be traced to subjective trauma endured in infancy and transferred into the trust relationship of psychotherapy.  Hedges introduces the term "the organizing experience" to chart the course of early traumas to its impact on adult living and the transference situation.  He describes the infant's primary life task as organizing channels to the human nurturing environment-first physiological connections to the mother's body and later psychological connections to the minds of mother and others.  

Reviews and comments from reviewers:
"Working the Organizing Experience is a remarkable book that establishes a solid and systematic foundation for the second century of psychoanalysis. . . . He creates a new concept __ nothing less than a reform and creation of psychoanalysis __ that has explicit and powerful clinical utility. Readers of every psychoanalytic viewpoint will be stimulated to rethink their theories."
—Marion F. Solomon

Provides Passionate Understanding of Primitive Relationships
"In this book Hedges presents his most complete treatment of his concept of the `organizing experience,' an approach to understanding difficulties in the earliest stages of personality development that lead some individuals to live their adult lives unable to comprehend their own experience or to establish relationships with others. . . . Hedges directs his work toward the practicing clinician. Not only does he provide compassionate understanding of primitive relationship styles but he also offers new therapeutic techniques for intervention, ways of being with and listening to individuals who desperately search for connectedness."
—Jacquelyn Gillespie