Doctors' feelings when facing chronic pain patients: Countertransference between symptom and treatment

Abstract

Doctors, when facing patients suffering from chronic pain, are driven to the limits of their clinical practice, which essentially is based on a diagnostic interpretation of the patient's signs and symptoms, leading to the appropriate therapeutic intervention. A doctor's awareness of his own experience of helpless distress facing these patients is bound to occur and to make him address the issues of transference between him and his patient. Listening to the patient's narrative is essential. This has a reassuring and therapeutic role for the patient in pain. Above all, it enables the doctor to evaluate the patient's intensity of distress and need for security and to recognize that he must let the patient express his feelings, without necessarily responding immediately.