The Process of Constructing the Self and Its Relation to Psychotherapy

The opposite pattern may also occur: the client may battle coercively (C3-6) to force the therapist into personal recognition of his or her unique self, sometimes using self-destructive risk-taking or tender seduction that concurrently demand and deny intimacy. When the therapist is too little formed, too soft and yielding, the client’s struggle may force intense and personal intimacy on the therapist which, when it fails or is withdrawn, can carve deep and painful cuts in the therapist. This not only harms the vulnerable therapist, but, when clients discover it, as they must, it may frighten them with a view of their power to destroy the hoped-for source of protection. The negotiation between the psychotherapist as a corrective attachment figure and client in the client’s zone of proximal development is limited or even curtailed. Where is the safety if the guide is a source of threat or refuses to acknowledge the danger? Where is the safety if the guide cannot enjoy closeness or is in need of protection? Is this anything more than a recasting of the notion of transference and counter-transference? Conceptualizing both therapist and client as emerging selves that are shaped, in part, by non-self and viewing therapy as an entraining interaction in which the two come together around issues of self-protection for the client is more than just a restatement of the transference issue. In particular, it suggests greater flexibility on the part of the therapist and presumes that the therapist can manage the balanced (B) state of self awareness, flexibility, and on-going adaptation. Although effective therapists must be able to use all strategies, each must be employed consciously and purposefully such that they serve only the strategic goals of the therapy and are not defensive for the therapist. The same, of course, is true for parents. They, too, need a range of strategies, but, as noted by the Papou_eks, parenting is usually intuitive (Papou_ek & Papou_ek, 1979). Therapists who deal with the failed outcomes of misguided intuitive parenting cannot so easily afford an unreflective approach. This is crucial when one considers the data on psychotherapists: more than a few (and far more than in the normative population) suffer from the same endangered childhood history and distorted intra- and interpersonal problems as their clientsii (Elliott & Guy, 1993; Pope & Feldman, 1992; Pope & Tabachnick, 1994; Radeke, 1998).