REFLECTIONS ON PSYCHOLOGY AND THERAPEUTIC PROCESS

While an ethical, effective, and professional counseling, psychotherapeutic, or psychoanalytic relationship has to be asymmetrical – the patient is paying for the practitioner’s professional expertise – both patient and psychoanalyst have much more in common than they do not: “everyone is much more simply human than otherwise.” People respond best in counseling, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis when they experience clinicians relating to them with “respect and dignity . .

Sophisticated statistical analyses indicate that the working relationship between patient and psychotherapist is the most important factor in outcome – specific therapeutic techniques or “schools of thought” are much less important than the connection experienced within the therapeutic dyad. “The amount of change attributable to the alliance is about five to seven times that of specific model or technique.” Further, much of this effect is a function of the extent to which the patient has the experience of being heard, understood, and emotionally held in the relationship.

What is apt to be impactful with someone is someone else being themselves with you, which then encourages you to be yourself with them – Earl C. Brown I have been seeing patients for over 40 years using an approach oriented by humanistic psychology, interpersonal relations research, mother-infant observational studies, developmental psychology across the life span, personal construct psychology, and relationally oriented theories.

How people differ in the way they adapt to (or have trouble coping with) problematic circumstances emerges in a relational context; the most important situations in life are interpersonal and involve other human beings! More precisely, as revered psychiatrist and psychotherapist Irvin Yalom once observed: “The single most important lesson the psychotherapist must learn…[is that] it is the relationship that heals…” Point: Helpful counseling, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis cannot happen without a vibrant, trusting, engaged, and safe relationship.