2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Be passionate about psychotherapy
means to be in contact with the client, stay human with him, not an automatic machine, a robot, be ready to meet him.
Quite often you can hear the opinion that a psychologist should be impassive. This statement, in my opinion, needs revision.
The position of impartiality most often means the idea of a specialist's neutrality, his impartiality, which supposedly allows one to treat the client objectively, which, in turn, is a criterion of professionalism. This approach as a whole reflects a scientistic attitude with its orientation towards a natural-scientific, objective method of studying reality. However, even in such an exact science as physics, it was concluded that “the observer influences the observed,” that is, “You are the consciousness observing the Universe and creating it (and yourself as a part of the Universe) by the very process of observation”. Thus, the idea of non-inclusion, impartiality, and, consequently, objectivity of the researcher was refuted.
In my opinion, it is rather difficult to imagine a “dispassionate” psychologist / psychotherapist and, at the same time, professionally successful. To be passionate in psychotherapy means to experience feelings, to be included in the psychotherapeutic process, to be in contact with the client, to remain with him as a human, not an automaton, a robot, to be ready to meet with the client.
The expression “personality is the main tool in psychotherapy” is present in almost every therapeutic direction and successfully reflects the idea of the psychotherapist's involvement in the therapeutic process not only as a professional, but also as a person. The idea of involvement, concern, subjectivity, passion of the therapist is the main condition for changing the client in the humanistically oriented directions of psychotherapy. This idea "lives" in the concepts of contact in the gestalt approach, dialogue, meeting - in the existential-humanistic directions of psychotherapy and is thoroughly presented in the works of humanist psychotherapists - May, Frankl, Bujenthal, Rogers.
The therapist's feelings have an important diagnostic function. For the psychologist / therapist, being in touch with your feelings means being sensitive to both the client and the therapeutic process. The impartial therapist automatically becomes insensitive not only to the client, but also to the process and to himself. As a result, he becomes not only professionally ineffective, but also prone to emotional burnout.
The professional therapist is aware of his feelings and in control of his passions. If you are not aware of your feelings, this does not mean that they are not there, it rather means that they control you. Unconscious feelings in one way or another (mostly non-verbal) will necessarily manifest in the therapeutic process. Clients, as a rule, are very sensitive and will certainly “count” your unconscious “messages” to them.
The problem of the therapist's feelings in the psychotherapeutic process has been discussed since psychoanalysis in terms of countertransference (countertransference). Countertransference in the broadest sense of this term is understood to mean that the therapist has all the emotional responses to the client. In almost all therapeutic directions, not only negative but also positive aspects of countertransference are indicated. The negative aspect of countertransference reactions occurs when the therapist is not aware of them. In the same case, when they are available to the psychotherapist's awareness, they perform an important diagnostic function.
Diagnostics of the client's condition by the therapist, as you know, is carried out not only on the intellectual, but also on the emotional level. Experienced psychotherapists do not ignore the emotional component of the client's perception. So, for example, the ideas described by the psychoanalytically oriented author N. McWilliams that clients with different levels of personality organization evoke different feelings in a psychotherapist are generally accepted: clients with a neurotic personality organization most often evoke sympathy, compassion, clients with borderline organization - irritation, aggression; clients with a psychotic organization - fear and even horror.
In this regard, it is not necessary to confuse the therapist's neutrality and his insensitivity. The professional therapist remains neutral in his assessments of the client and at the same time sensitive to him and his inner world.
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