Diversity, Discipline and Devotion in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

This book reflects the author's involvement and preoccupation with the growth and diversification of counseling and psychotherapy, with the imperatives of training, supervision and regulation, and with the significant changes in the profession due to the invention of brief, time-limited, intermittent and recurrent psychotherapy. An overall theme is the conviction that what patients and therapists share is vulnerability, and that the therapist is a 'wounded healer', whose reparative tendency informs his professional choice, his therapeutic empathy and his capacity to bear the rigors of therapeutic work. Thus an unconscious connection between the helper and the helped is the driving force of every therapeutic relationship, for better and for worse. Its responsible management requires thorough training, ongoing supervision and a firm frame in order to contain the powerful forces operating in the meeting of two strangers for the purpose of therapy.