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Biomedical subjects

J S Scharff

Publications and source records attributed to J S Scharff.

3 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2000

On writing from clinical experience.

Papers that present the life of the analytic session offer material through which analysts can together study analytic process and therapeutic action and arrive at consensus on how to improve psychoanalytic theory and practice. But some analysts have been deterred from publishing clinical material of that kind because of concerns about preserving confidentiality, protecting the therapeutic relationship, reporting accurately, being scrutinized, worrying about losing their colleagues' support, and not feeling authorized to present their views. Here conscious, preconscious, and unconscious constraints against writing and publishing are explored, and an example is given of successful self-analysis of a writing inhibition. The debate over the ethics of writing is reviewed and an argument made that detailed clinical description is useful in advancing analytic understanding. Finally, a clinical example shows how the analysand usefully analyzes the experience of reading what the analyst has written, and how the analyst's self-analysis may be promoted in resonance with the analysand's experience.

Consciousness↗
PubMed1997

Object relations couple therapy.

The authors describe Fairbairn's view of the personality as a system of parts of self and object in dynamic relation, formed in the context of dependent early relationships and replayed in the intensely intimate and physical relationship of marriage. Through Klein's concept of projective identification, a spouse finds lost parts of the self in the partner, where they may flourish and be reintegrated into the self or they may be held hostage. Marriage is an opportunity for reworking the dynamic relation of parts of the self as they are modified through mutual unconscious interaction with the spouse, but it may become a closed system that inhibits growth of the individual partners. Object relations couple therapy aims to breach the closed system of the unhappy marriage, and offers an enlarged space for understanding that encourages the spouses to provide a better holding environment for each other. Not directive, didactic or symptom-focused, object relations therapy values affect, silence, body language, fantasy, dreams, and transference phenomena as necessary for reaching the unconscious in order to achieve insight. The object relations therapist interprets defenses against anxieties that underlie repetitive patterns of unhelpful behavior, and works toward understanding. As the clinical vignettes show, therapists use countertransference to understand the couple's shared transference from inside their experience. The engine of therapeutic change in this model is the therapist's self. The process of therapy improves the couple's capacity for containing each other's projections instead of refusing to resonate with them or being overtaken by them to the detriment of the self. A cycle of regression and progression in the couple's ability for containment is found as therapy proceeds. The goal of therapy is to enable the projective and introjective identificatory system of the marriage to function with greater concern for the other and respect for the self.

Adult↗