21st Century Aging

I've been waiting for someone to tackle Merkin's piece here at PT! Thanks for being the first, and writing so eloquently about it.

You also wrote...

"Therapists of any stripe are people too, and as she points out, quite fallible. Of course, I could talk about how the wish patients have for us to be perfect is related to transference, and that part of successful treatment involves coming to terms with the limitations of the therapist--this a good thing to work out because it usually generalizes to the wish many of us have for those we love to never disappoint us."

Maybe back in Freud's day, when he and Breuer concocted this theory to deal with the case of Anna O. But not today, in a consumerist world. I don't feel it's transference when my patients expect their auto mechanic to fix their car properly the first time or fix their fix for nothing. I don't think it's transference when a patient rails against a doctor for a blown diagnosis, particularly if the doctor missed something obvious. I don't think it's transference to be angry at a lawyer for a mediocre brief, or your personal trainer for sleepwalking through a training session.

Honestly. Psychotherapy is the only profession out there that aspires to Winnicott's notion of "good-enough" as good enough. No wonder we're derided.

Patients want to know about their therapists lives to make sure that...

a. therapists have a life vocabulary to understand them
b. therapists are not null on the subjects that they are going to bring up.

Could you imagine talking about issues of polyamory with a therapist who got married as a freshman in college and who has had exactly one sex partner in his entire life? 'Nuff said.

I started reading Merkin's article with high hopes, but think I was both bored and agitated by the end of the first page - so much so, that I stopped reading it soon after.

The technical terms alone (e.g., "Projection. Repression. Acting out. Defenses. Secondary compensation. Transference.") were just driving me crazy! The idea of psychoanalysis as some kind of parlor game or intellect exercise really gets on my nerves, mainly because I don't think patients are cured by these exercises.

There are so many different methods out there calling themselves psychoanalysis, I wonder whether it's at all useful to use the term. For example, my practice of psychoanalysis seems so radically different from others I've read about that it seems a bit like comparing apples and oranges.

I'm also biased of course - because of the type of analysis I practice. In my practice of modern psychoanalysis, I think I'd be surprised to hear technical terms during a session. More importantly, patients make progress and get better. Isn't that the point of therapy?

I'm sure I'll get back to finish reading the article eventually - after all it is about psychoanalysis.