Re: High Hat (Was other things)
On Jun 18, 2007, at 2:04 PM, Carl Remick wrote:
No, I’m not talking about psychologists’ “techniques for increasing
empathy in children.” I’m talking about empathy between psychotherapists
and their patients. In fact, therapists are specifically warned against
developing full-fledged peer relationships with their patients, are they not?
Isn’t “countertransference” the ultimate psychotherapeutic no-no? The
whole basis for the therapist-patient relationship is not one of peer empathy
but one of inequality and clinical detachment — i.e., “Me, high-and-mighty
medical expert; you, lowly neurotic.”
No! The patient is likely to put the shrink in that position - “the
subject presumed to know” in the classic Lacanian formula - but by
all reports the shrink feels all kinds of things for the patient. I
once knew a classically Freudian shrink who cried when a patient
called to announce he was terminating. It’s certainly not a peer
relationship (though I once knew someone who went clothes shopping
with her Lacanian-feminist analyst), but countertransference is
inevitable, and the shrink has to analyze it along with the patient’s
transference.
Doug