Seduction, Surrender, and Transformation: Emotional Engagement in the Analytic Process (Relational Perspectives Book Series)
Karen J. Maroda
Language: English
Pages: 216
ISBN: 0881633976
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Seduction, Surrender, and Transformation demonstrates how interpersonal psychoanalysis obliges analysts to engage their patients with genuine emotional responsiveness, so that not only the patient but the analyst too is open to ongoing transformation through the analytic experience. In so doing, the analyst moves from the position of an "interpreting observer" to that of an "active participant and facilitator" whose affective communications enable the patient to acquire basic self-trust along with self-knowledge.
Drawing on the current literature on affect, Maroda argues that psychological change occurs through affect-laden interpersonal processes. Given that most patients in psychotherapy have problems with affect management, the completing of cycles of affective communication between therapist and patient becomes a vitally important aspect of the therapeutic enterprise. Through emotionally open responses to their patients and careful use of patient-prompted self-disclosures, analysts can facilitate affect regulation responsibly and constructively, with the emphasis always remaining on the patients' experience.
Moments of mutual surrender - the honest emotional giving over of patient to analyst and analyst to patient - epitomize the emotionally intense interpersonal experiences that lead to enduring intrapsychic change. Maroda's work is profoundly personal. She does not hesitate to share with the reader how her own personality affects her thinking and her work. Indeed, she believes her theoretical and clinical preferences are emblematic of the way in which the analyst's subjectivity necessarily shapes theory choice and practice preferences in general. Seduction, Surrender, and Transfomation is not only a powerful brief for emotional honesty in the analytic relationship but also a model of the personal openness that, according to Maroda, psychoanalysis demands of all its practitioners.
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synonymous with patient-bashing. I am not the one who hates and rages, my patient is. Again, we have a tradition of making someone else the bad object. To take this exploration even further, it might be true that we, as therapists, have not come to terms with our own parents' failures. When this is so, the patients' parents can become the "bad objects" not only in the patient's life, but in our own. I realized once when I was particularly angry at a patient's parents for being undermining and
internalized by the patient. Modern notions of mutuality, relationality, intersubjectivity, and particularly social construction, add on or depart from this traditional view of the therapeutic action of analysis. Gehrie (1996), in his review of Kohut's perceptions of what is therapeutic, quotes him as saying, "'The gradual acquisition of empathic contact with mature selfobjects is the essence of the psychoanalytic cure'" (p. 189). Kohut's view could easily be seen as an extension of, or
intentions. Second, because regression and surrender take up too much energy and concentration. (Winnicott said he could only regress with one or two patients at a time. The others had to queue up and wait their turn.) Third, we fear facing our own primitive selves that are revealed when our patients break through to us. Our feelings of empathic pain, lust, rage, envy, disgust, and love may sometimes be too much for us to bear. Fourth, we fear being hurt, rejected and/or abandoned in our moment
experience, I would say that McDougall's "something" is usually the experience and expression of the patient's split-off affect. Unable to bear their own feelings, many patients seek to have their analysts feel and express these feelings for them, so they can find them acceptable and learn to do this for themselves. For the therapist to deny the patient this essential experience, which we can liken to the mother's early affective responding to the infant, is to deprive the patient of an essential
misuses of self-disclosure. The following examples illustrate the instances cited above. A number of years ago I was treating a young woman who was probably the most lovable person I ever saw. She was full of feeling, was emotionally available, worked hard during her sessions, and came to each session with insights and comments from the previous one. She was the kind of patient we all dream of having. Yet she had felt unloved by her mother. One day, she was crying in a heartbreaking way, telling
