Posted by pseudoname on April 11, 2006, at 12:29:48
In reply to Re: that brand of therapy ;-) » pseudoname, posted by Dinah on April 10, 2006, at 20:19:05
Hey, Dinah. I'm glad you came back from your “pause”. :-)
> I have a feeling i made no sense. (nm)
I think you gave a good account of why most people on the psych board like the idea of transference.
> I rather think that transference isn't a useless or baseless theory.
I wish now I hadn't put it so harshly. I forgot that I was posting on a public board, not having a tete-a-tete. I should've been more respectful of others' investment in very serious therapy issues, and I apologize to anyone offended. I'm grateful anybody wants to talk about these things with me, and I don't want to come off as a troll.
I like my last post better (“Testing transference”).
> you can see it in action every day
> Dr. Bob is the same person, yet different people see him so wildly differently.Actually, I can't see it. I see different people having starkly different responses, but I do NOT know what causes those differences. On the basis of published research and some speculation, I assume that many things are involved…
•other current social resources,
•current sex/romance relationships
•myriad other current cortisol-releasing stresses,
•other current endorphin- & testosterone-releasing successes,
•recently acquired habits of response *to* emotions,
•social skills & habits acquired with peers in the teen years,
•religious & political beliefs,
•individual tolerance levels for emotional distress from any cause,
•current social pressures about behavior (manners, etc)
•assumptions and mistaken information,
•permanent minor differences in brain structure,
•brain chemistry changes (from meds, etc),as well as
•consistent long-term features of childhood relationships with caregivers and others.
In all that mess, virtually none of which is actually scientifically traceable as an individual lives in real life, I don't know how someone can assert that a given difference is due to transference and not to five or six of the other influences.
Even (mostly) pre-transferential babies start out having wildly different attitudes and interests.
The fact that a response is troublesome or uncommon or disproportionally intense is not evidence that it's transference instead of some other combination of influences.
I think the allure of transference theory is that it gives a compelling, reassuring explanation for our scary, unpredictable, uncontrollable emotions.
I read "Bangkok 8", a detective novel set in Thailand. The characters kept referring to previous lives to explain their own and others' odd, intense emotional reactions. It's an exact parallel with transference. There is *real* (perfectly authentic) therapeutic benefit of believing in past lives, but no scientific basis for that belief, and (I think) the therapeutic effect can be obtained more directly with an approach deliberately targeting it.
That benefit, I think, is accepting troublesome emotions with a shrug, diminishing their importance, ignoring them, and doing what you want to do despite their occurrence. But I think that transference theory, besides being (oh here I go again) very dubiously “veridical” wastes time and effort that could be spent deliberately zeroing in on its good effect.
By rejecting transference or other psychdynamic ideas, I'm NOT arguing for CBT. It's got some truly helpful techniques but as you say, it's far from a cure-all. I think it's far more limited than Beck & Burns & those folks say.
I keep bringing up the *acceptance* portion of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which has some overlap with DBT, but no one seems interested. Probably because it looks like stiff-upper-lip on first glance. But I think the benefit of mindful acceptance of uncontrollable, unexplainable emotions is EXACTLY the real therapeutic benefit than *can* come from transference therapy, but deliberately targeted, not hit-or-miss, and without the (IMO) pseudoscience, obsession with childhood, and other unproductive baggage of psychoanalytic theory.
Thanks for hearing me out.
poster:pseudoname
thread:628935
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060406/msgs/631757.html