Do You Wanna Be An Analyst?

This week has been a psychoanalytic kind of week.

On Sunday, I went with a few other members of my cohort to a roundtable with the Philadelphia Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology. The discussion was all about how we can use our personal experiences to benefit the client. It was interesting because we've been learning a lot about how disclosing our personal information can be problematic in therapy, and because we have learned that psychoanalysis is the theory most adamantly against self-disclosure in therapy. According to Freud, the therapist has to be a blank slate with no experiences of their own so that the client can transfer images of their family members onto the therapist.

At the roundtable, however, we learned that countertransference (when the therapist transfers images of people in their own life onto the client) can actually help us in a lot of ways, for example it can allow us to better understand the client's experience. One member of the roundtable spoke about how he had a hard time coming out as gay to his parents. In therapy, after inadvertently bringing up a center for gay men that the therapist frequents, the client revealed that his son was gay. This brought up an entirely new aspect of the client's life that the therapist could help with.

I thought of another view on the use of self-disclosure in therapy when I spoke to a friend who has actually worked with a legitimate Freudian psychoanalyst, one who, unlike the professionals at the roundtable, believes in the therapist as a blank soundboard who supplies no real input in the therapy session. Just the thought of such a therapeutic relationship seems so dry and meaningless! I definitely subscribe much more to theories that place importance on a mutual and collaborative therapeutic relationship, and on at least some measure of therapist self-disclosure. Of course, we still have to make sure that our own disclosure doesn't take away from the client's work. It's the client's therapy after all, not yours!

But one big thing I think everyone should know about this psychoanalytic roundtable is the opportunity it provided for us to meet people from other grad school programs and practicing psychologists in the area. We actually connected with someone getting their PsyD at Widener and I hope we get to hang out with him again and attend other events on the use of different techniques in psychotherapy. After all, how else are we going to become the best therapists we can be?