According
to Natterson, love, or the actualization of love, is the aim of the
psychoanalytic treatment process where love is defined as “the desire to
recognize” and “the caring interest in the patient’s subjectivity.” In an
atmosphere and context of the mutual care giving of the therapeutic encounter,
dependency and individuation are negotiated between patient and analyst. Lachmann
and Beebe, though they do not call it love, offer a manifestation of mutual
care giving in the therapeutic process where self- and mutual- regulation are
enhanced. Lachmann rightly notes that it is the analyst’s responsibility to match
posture, prosody, intensity, gaze, or attune to the patient’s self state, but
Natterson, I think, would see this attempt at matching and attunement as an act of love. When, I wonder aloud for candidates, do we see
evidence of care giving from the analysand to the analyst?
Candidate
Dimitris Tsiakos writes this about Natterson’s paper:
The question of how the
therapeutic experience unleashes the potential for love and thus leads to
actualization of self may be answered in the following way. The patient comes
to therapy for help with a particular problem, but also the patient is bringing
as subtext his or her unique version of a universal aim, namely, the
achievement of love. Correspondingly, the therapist's desire to help improve
the patient's life is an unstated but fundamental wish to give love. But what is
the fate of the therapist? The therapist leads a complex life outside the
therapeutic chamber, of course, and after a successful therapeutic experience
has ended, the therapist, like the patient, brings his or her gains of love and
self to the other areas of intersubjective relatedness, including the other
therapeutic projects in which he or she participates. Love from others, love for others,
and love for self all increase in essential simultaneity.
The two
papers are a point of view about relationship in the analytic setting. At TBIPS
we talk about the subjectivity of both participants and think about their relationship
before we ever start talking about the contributions of the great,
historical minds of Freud, Ferenczi, Klein, Winnicott, Sullivan, Kohut, Mitchell,
Bromberg, and others, on formal theory and technique.
Lachmann,
F.M., Beebe, B. (1996). Chapter 7 The
Contribution of Self- and Mutual Regulation to
Therapeutic Action: A Case Illustration. Progress in Self Psychology,
12:123-140.
Natterson,
J.M. (2003). Love in Psychotherapy.
Psa. Psychol., 20:509-521.
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