Transference: Uses and Abuses

Joseph Burgoin
The Psychotherapy Relationship
138

A visitor to the site submitted several questions about transference in response to an earlier post, and I thought they were so interesting and useful, they deserved a lengthy reply -- hence today's post. As a prelude, I'd like to say a few things about how I view the transference, which is different from the way Freud thought about it, and different from the way most lay people understand it today.

Although ideas about transference appear in his work as early as the Studies in Hysteria (1895), it is with the case of Dora (1905) that Freud really begins to think about and articulate his vision of the transference: "What are transferences? They are new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and phantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis; but they have this peculiarity, which is characteristic for their species, that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician."

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A Request for Input

Joseph Burgoin
Points of Departure
23

I'd like to continue making videos for my YouTube channel; I want to do a series of lectures or talks that would be easier and faster to produce, without all the editing involved in using film clips. I've got some thoughts about what might work, but I'd like to ask for your input on this issue. What I'm looking for is a theme that might unite a number of different videos. When my book on psychological defense mechanisms comes out next year, I'm planning to do a whole series about individual defenses, but it feels premature to begin that project right now. Any thoughts? What would be of interest to you? I would definitely want it to me more clinical, more focused on the psychotherapy process. Please write and let me know if you have any suggestions. Thanks!

The Narcissistic Mother

Joseph Burgoin
Relationship Issues
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Shame/Narcissism
499

Before I decided to stop writing my 'Movies and Mental Health' blog, I had intended to do a video about the narcissistic mother as portrayed in two different films, Black Swan and The Fighter; in this post, I'll be referring to those films but I won't include video clips. If you haven't seen them, I recommend both movies for their psychological insight into family dynamics and, in particular, the role of the narcissistic mother.

There's a degree of narcissism inherent in the relationship between most parents and their children: we take pride in their achievements and feel they somehow reflect well upon us when they do succeed. I'm very proud of my kids and take pleasure in recounting their latest achievements to my friends, and those friends in return (the ones who have kids of their own) appear to feel the same way about their offspring. "My son the doctor" ... you know what I mean. On some level, I suppose we view our children as a type of achievement of our own: we've spent so many years raising and caring for them that we feel pride in ourselves, as well as in them, when they turn out well.

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Vacation Breaks in Psychotherapy and Defenses Against Need

Joseph Burgoin
Defense Mechanisms
·
The Psychotherapy Relationship
·
Unbearable Emotion
174

In my last post, I discussed how clients need to become emotionally dependent upon their therapists for psycho-dynamic treatment to be effective. How difficult the client finds it to tolerate his or her own needs obviously plays a major role in the development of that dependency. As I've said before, neediness is often one of the first issues we confront when we begin therapy: early experiences of untrustworthy or unreliable caregivers may have taught us that it's unsafe to become too dependent, making us reluctant to "commit" to the psychotherapy relationship. These are ongoing issues that repeatedly come to the surface during treatment, especially around the therapist's vacations, which often stir up abandonment issues or cause the old doubts as to the safety of the psychotherapy relationship to reemerge.

I recently returned to work from a 10-day vacation, and many of my clients had strong reactions to the break, none of them the same and each reflecting the person's particular defenses. During my early years as a therapist, I found that I often lost clients immediately before and after my vacations; nobody decided to quit this time (with the possible exception of the client I described in my last post, discussed in more detail below), but there has been more "instability" in my schedule than usual -- one session time "forgotten" by a client, some re-scheduling, emails expressing confusion about the appointment time, etc. This type of behavior usually (but not always) has a psychological meaning that you might uncover in the next session if you listen carefully.

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