Patients' Coaching Behaviours, Transference Testing and the Corrective Emotional Experience: Transcending the Self in Psychotherapy

Abstract

This article is broadly based within a psychodynamic approach to psychotherapy, drawing on object relations theories and, more specifically, on an object relations model outlined by Frank Summers, namely, relational psychoanalysis. The article explores the notion that because attachment to the object is central to the development of a sense of identity and belonging, individuals will seek to preserve the relationship at the expense of the development of their authentic self. In this way, those aspects of themselves that they perceive to be unacceptable to others and thus often to themselves, will be buried in order to maintain the relationship. The therapeutic relationship, as an interpersonal matrix, may echo patients' problematic modes of being and relating. However, the therapeutic relationship is potentially one in which such problematic patterns of relating may be resolved rather than re-enacted. In this context, patients may experience in therapy a ‘transcendence of the self as they begin to experience how they are relating, and more importantly, how such relating may result in the arrested development of their authentic self. The article makes links between three therapeutic phenomena in which problematic patterns of relating are embedded: (a) patients' coaching behaviours, (b) transference testing and (c) the corrective emotional experience. Such links are not clearly made in the literature. Furthermore, clinical material is drawn from the author's work as a psychotherapist and is used to illustrate transference-testing behaviours and three of its components, namely: (a) testing by compliance, (b) testing by non-compliance and (c) passive-into-active testing.