Hiring the one-armed surgeon

Two of the most commented posts on my blog are about charging patients for missed sessions and how psychotherapies end. As there is no single correct approach to either of these, there’s plenty of room for practices legitimately to vary, and plenty of room for patients, i.e., most of my commenters, to express their likes […]

My goal as a therapist: to make myself obsolete

Traditional psychodynamic therapy is often caricatured as endless, with a complacent therapist silently growing cobwebs, listening to a patient who never plans to leave. This isn’t completely unfounded: there are therapeutic advantages to losing track of time, “swimming in the material,” and letting one’s therapeutic focus be broad. The patient’s chief complaint, i.e., the […]

Therapy for therapists

Tara Parker-Pope of the New York Times blog Well featured my prior post, on the feelings some patients have as they imagine whether their psychotherapists have been in therapy themselves. My post was about patients’ fantasies, not the reality of therapy for therapists. Nonetheless, many of the comments argued for the great value of such […]

Is your therapist biased by money?

Earlier this year, blog commenter TK wrote:

“Isn’t this the greatest countertransference, in this age of fee-for-service psychotherapy as opposed to psychotherapist-on-salary: How do I work around my own economic motivation in deciding whether to continue with a patient or terminate?

“In other words, how does one reconcile the consistent economic incentive to keep a […]

Countertransference, an overview

I attended a very good lecture this week on contemporary views of countertransference. It inspired me to write a brief overview of the concept here, with more to follow.

To understand countertransference, it helps to tackle transference first. As I’ve discussed previously, transference was a word coined by Sigmund Freud to label the way patients […]