Deconstructing what we read

Nothing pleases an instructor more than when students learn to read and think critically. How pleased was I then when the first year class at TBIPS was able to take the clinical vignette from an assigned journal article, deconstruct the reported interaction, and come up with additional points of view.

In the assigned artice, the author began with some background: a young woman of a withdrawn, depressed mother and a hostile, accusatory father was described as being opaque to others, unable to be vulnerable and emotionally intimate with others, operating from a paranoid-schizoid position, distrustful of men, found it difficult to bond with women, and experienced interpretations as intrusive and insulting. The analyst complained that his attempts at empathy were rebuffed.

Then followed from the author/analyst a brief portion of process notes:

The patient was indignant about a male colleague who had made advances; the male analyst responded by giving an explanation for the colleague’s behavior. [The class easily recognized the analyst as defending the other’s, not the patient’s, point of view, in essence an attack on the patient’s reality. ] The patient responds derisively, accusing the male analyst of being like all those other men who think they can say or do anything with women.

The patient continues, talking about being professionally excluded by an Old Boys’ Club at work. The analyst, attempting empathy, lands on interpreting her feeling alone, without female colleagues. The patient says she thinks the analyst really think she is a bitch and she accuses her analyst of phony empathy. [The analyst does not consider here his own contribution to his patient’s rebuff, that perhaps the patient perceives accurately what is in her analyst’s heart. The analyst, after all, had only moments before attacked her point of view.]

The patient then complains about her very bad day and asks her analyst if he has ever had such a day. The analyst asks for her thoughts. [Here the analyst is the opaque one, being with his patient exactly what he, in his description of her, accused her of being, and he is likewise being unknown to her, just as her depressed mother had been. Is this an enactment?, the class asks.] The patient then insults the analyst, accusing him of being uncaring and, as a man, without compassion.

Vignettes from the literature and from our own clinical experiences are often used in classes to improve our skills. And where the medium is the message, we deconstruct who we are alongside what we say and think, leaning in the direction of hope, empathic attunement, and opening the third space. Next time I will post on how the Intro. class used Winnicott.