Quote:
Originally Posted by BudFox
I certainly never said all therapy ends in heartbreak. I'm just asking questions. I find it shocking how rarely the transference hypothesis is challenged. It's helpful for me to scrutinize this stuff, and I hope that it helps others who are getting nothing but the standard urgings and pep talks -- it's normal, trust your therapist, tell your therapist about your feelings, you gotta work through it. Seems like this stuff is so widely repeated and so entrenched that clients are practically hypnotized. I would counter that there is very little that is normal about developing overpowering feelings for a paid professional who by definition cannot and will never return said feelings. The assumption that this will somehow be parlayed into a healing experience, when seen objectively, looks pretty sketchy IMO.
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I appreciate you and others questioning. I question it all a bit too. I am really trying to use my head in all this. I would find a conversation about transference (at least general transference or paternal-type transference) very valuable, and in a list of topics I'd like to discuss I mentioned transference, so we'll see if that conversation can actually take place. The erotic transference piece is annoying as all get-out to me, so clichéd and problematic, I want it to go away, I don't think I'll be able to summon the courage to discuss that. So in the above advice, "get over or get through" I guess I'll have to just get over that part on my own. As for the healing experience, yeah, what will that look like, exactly? Will I be more confident? Less needy and more self-reliant? These are questions I should ask, and I guess we all should. I certainly understand your skepticism, and feel some myself. I don't want to be in therapy for 5 years and feel just as broken at the end as I do now.