Abstract
For many women in therapy, friends and friendship are often an ongoing source of support and encouragement as well as conflict and pain. This “psychological sea” (Rangell in J Am Psychoanal Assoc 11:3–54, 1963) frequently acts as a quiet background to any therapeutic process, playing a largely unexamined role in a wide range of relational and psychodynamic areas. When these relationships move into the foreground of therapeutic exploration, they are often understood as contemporary repetitions of familial and historical relational patterns. I have found, however, in my own work and in the work of clinicians I teach and supervise, that women clients’ friendships can sometimes hold keys to important, unarticulated and even unrecognized relational and intrapsychic issues of their own, sometimes separate from or only marginally related to family dynamics. This article examines some of these patterns and the psychodynamics they may reveal.
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Notes
To protect privacy and confidentiality, identifying information, including names, personal data, and specific clinical material in all examples has been altered.
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F. Diane Barth, LCSW, declares that she has no conflict of interest.
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Barth, F.D. Not Good at Friends: Bringing a Woman’s Friendships into the Frame in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy. Clin Soc Work J 46, 1–7 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10615-018-0647-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10615-018-0647-8