Home
- Articoli sulla Psicologia Giuridica
The Process of Constructing the Self and Its Relation to Psychotherapy
di Patricia M. Crittenden
pag. 5 di 19
Possibly the
most important connection is that, having achieved sexual intimacy with the predictable outcome
of childbirth, the protective efforts of both parents are needed to maximize the probability of
survival of their progeny.
Psychotherapists function as substitute attachment figures to clients seeking protection from
perceived threat to the self. In this role, they, like parental attachment figures, attempt to soothe
and comfort clients and also to enable them to learn more effective self-protective and selfcomforting
strategies. (It should be noted that when the danger is physical, other professionals,
such as police or physicians, are needed.) The use of a paid professional as a substitute
attachment figure carries the potential for both a corrective process that could free clients from
the misperception of threat and also a distorting process that could exacerbate the problems of
clients. For example, the therapist could provide the secure base from which the client could
explore their past experience with danger and anxiety or, alternatively, could add the therapist’s
own distortions to the client’s. A particular threat is that, in the intimacy of their attachment
relationship, sexual feelings would be aroused. Because this is a natural co-occurrence outside of
therapy, it would be expected within psychotherapy as well.
Maturation
The process of self-organization is regulated by maturation. This means that, as the brain
matures, the number of ways in which it can represent the relation of self to non-self increases.
Awareness of the array of strategic organizations and their developmental progression can
facilitate therapists’ recognition of clients’ strategies, clarify their adaptive historical roots, and
promote selection of ameliorative therapeutic techniques. Like Guidano’s post-rationalist
constructivist perspective, dynamic-maturational theory posits that most strategies were adaptive
in the context in which they developed. Infants can only represent experience as two simple
transformations of sensory stimulation.
Cognition. One transformation is based on the temporal order of the stimulation. This
“cognitive” transformation is represented as sensorimotor procedures of how the self responds to
stimulation and the effects of that response.