Questions
and Answers
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Questions |
I think about my therapist all the time and desperately wish for a closer relationship with her. I want to be her friend too. Will this desire for a personal friendship ever go away? I feel so desperate about it sometimes.
The desire for a personal relationship with your psychotherapist is called a transference reaction to the psychotherapy. Now, many persons believe that transference is some sort of an unrealistic misperception of the psychotherapist by the client. But the great French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan taught, and I agree with him, that “transference” is nothing more nor less than real life occurring in the therapeutic situation. For example, if you have been mistreated in the past so that you’re extremely sensitive to fears of abandonment, then in all of your relationships you will encounter events that trigger those fears. And the psychotherapeutic relationship is no exception. Of course, the events that happen in psychotherapy aren’t really attempts by the psychotherapist to abandon you (that is, if the psychotherapist is a competent psychotherapist), but they will still have realistic elements that could be felt as abandonment, such as when the psychotherapist has to reschedule an appointment. The fact that such an inadvertent occurrence triggers such fears then becomes a meaningful event for you to explore in the psychotherapy for connections to your past. There’s also another side to this transference concept as well: positive feelings. In some cases, such feelings derive from “common” love; that is, you desire to fill your inner emptiness with romantic illusions about another person. But in other cases, a different dynamic can be at work. If you have somehow had your self-image altered by some traumatic event of the past, such as childhood sexual molestation, then you will tend to think of yourself as unworthy of any feelings of purity. Nevertheless, when you encounter a person who does not mistreat you, you will feel genuine fondness. And it makes no difference if this person is a friend or a psychotherapist. It’s all real life. These feelings might be unsettling to you, because they contradict your perception of yourself as a “bad” person, but they are nonetheless an aspect of your true goodness. In either case, though, your task in psychotherapy is not to become an actual friend of your psychotherapist but simply to understand your inner capacity to relate to another person out of a mutual concern for each other’s good. It’s only by talking openly and honestly, within the psychotherapy itself, about your feelings for your psychotherapist that you can come to achieve this understanding. In fact, genuine psychotherapy demands that, in order to avoid the trap of the love-hate flip-flop, a “third person”—the unconscious—must always be present in the consulting room between the client and the psychotherapist. Through their mutual willingness to look at all events within the psychotherapy—and discuss them openly—as manifestations of the unconscious, both the client and the psychotherapist can focus on healing rather than get caught up in all the perversions of “love” and hate. If you learn this lesson properly, then you can go out and begin to make some real friends. But if you cling to the wish to be a friend with your psychotherapist, you are clinging to nothing more than an illusion behind which you hide your fear of abandonment and loneliness—the very fears that prevent you from being a friend with anyone. And if that’s the case, then you haven’t done genuine psychotherapy.
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