Abstract
Over the years, David Shapiro’s career and mine have intersected productively several times. I think we have a talent for bouncing ideas off one another. This piece is about one such encounter, or perhaps it was a mythical encounter for my recollection of it lacks detail. In any case, I prefer not to check on the veridicality of my memory; it serves me well enough, whether or not it tells me the truth in any absolute sense about this occasion of enlightenment. As you will see, I take a narrative view toward truth-telling, and I will leave it to Dr. Shapiro to vet my recollection of the founding incident. In his modest way, he may disown having been the source of my inspiration. I accept that risk. It will make no essential difference to my conclusions, and in view of our long acquaintance, I prefer to be grateful to him rather than to one of his antecedents; if he feels he has not met all of his obligations to his intellectual forbearers, they are for him to acquit. Anyway, enough throat clearing, or to unmix the metaphor, enough pen wiping or pencil sharpening; let me get on with it already.
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Notes
- 1.
As I will discuss only the words spoken by the patient to the therapist in the psychotherapy Âsetting, I will only note here that my remarks apply equally, if most often with less urgency, to words spoken by either party in any social setting.
- 2.
If space permits, I will spell out some of the implications of this statement; if not, I leave the issue with the advice that it is best to assume that all patient speech, however realistic, bears some stamp of the patient’s past; but it is not safe to assume that this stamp necessarily is of immediate clinical significance.
- 3.
That is, I can’t think of any others at the moment but want to leave open the possibility that there may be others. I am afraid I am not cut out to be a dogmatist.
- 4.
That is, it is up to the therapist to discover the faulty premises from which the patient logically drew his realistically incorrect opinions.
- 5.
The knowledgeable reader will recognize that I have not offered a complete theory of transference to which one would have to add the contribution of role theory and cognitive theory.
- 6.
I do recognize that it may be an excessive expectation that students will grasp this principle and be able to apply it regularly in the course of one semester with their first patients.
- 7.
One might invoke the concept of regression to explain it.
- 8.
This may be the point to remind the reader that transference is a Latinate translation of the German Ăśbertragung, literally to carry across, and that metaphor is a Greek term with the same literal meaning.
- 9.
I weaseled by stating the patient’s choice of what to present and what to withhold as a preference, thus avoiding taking a stand on whether the patient is aware of being in conflict and by implication the whole issue of “the unconscious.” I did so because I want to engage Dr. Shapiro on the larger matter of the derivation of much of what I (and I believe he too) do clinically from his aphorism without descending (or rising) to discussing whether we need to invoke any variety of metapsychology.
- 10.
Clearly, having taken the coward’s path in regard to metapsychology, after asserting that the patient does as he must, you will expect me to follow suit by dodging the issue of “free will.”
- 11.
I allude here to the necessity of turning to cognitive theory and social psychology to understand the full complexity of the general phenomenon of expectation, of which transference is a component.
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Schlesinger, H.J. (2011). Another View of Psychotherapy?. In: Piers, C. (eds) Personality and Psychopathology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6214-0_1
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