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.”

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.

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!

When patients contact me to make an initial appointment, I tell them about my beginning process.