Posted by special_k on April 12, 2006, at 23:26:44
In reply to alternatives to transference » Dinah, posted by pseudoname on April 11, 2006, at 12:29:48
> 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.yeah. i hear what you are saying. so you think that 'transference' will eventually be eliminated as people come to a greater understanding of these other factors. as the science of behaviour progresses... we will explain behaviour by recourse to some of those factors instead of the catch all 'transference'. i guess... i agree...
> 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.
yeah.
> I think the allure of transference theory is that it gives a compelling, reassuring explanation for our scary, unpredictable, uncontrollable emotions.yeah... though... pseudoexplanation...
Kaplan and Saddock "synopsis of psychiatry" say:'Transference is the patient's displacement onto the analyst of early wishes and feelings towards persons from the past. Some resistences may emerge because patients experience the psychiatrist as a parental figure from the past, and they seek to defy the perceived parental control. A contemporary view of transference would acknowledge that the analyst or physician's real characteristics always influence the transference. In other words, one could describe transference as an admixture of figures from the patient's past and the *real relationship* with the clinician in the present'.
hmm... that is very different from what i was thinking... or maybe related... but still quite a bit different. i thought transference was a defence... but no it doesn't seem to be...
> 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.
yeah, okay.
> 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.okay. but... couldn't transference still happen (authority issues etc).???
> I keep bringing up the *acceptance* portion of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which has some overlap with DBT, but no one seems interested.ahem. i think i've shown an interest ;-) i'm interested because of Linehan and her focus on acceptance. she wrote something with hayes (the ACT guy) and i started reading it online but didn't get the whole thing (what i read was very interesting indeed... about the third wave... behaviourism... cognitive behaviour therapy... then the third wave of balancing acceptance with cognitive behavioural change)
> You do seem ambivalent about the ideas. Ambivalence itself is a psychoanalytic theme. ;-)
yeah. i should look up 'ambivalence' lol.
> I too have been *struggling* with theories of therapy. I found a very real allure in psychoanalytic ideas. It didn't make any difference to me at the time that there was an utter lack of any evidential basis for believing them.
yeah... hurting people etc etc... and lack of alternatives.. sigh. i still don't know...
> But it was so reassuring to think that the problems I had would eventually be understable in terms of things I already have access to, namely my own feelings and history. Things I'm intimately familiar with and that are really important to me and that have been dismissed by other people all too often – namely my feelings & fears & ideas & so on.
yeah. maybe that is the appeal really.
> But I think that the exact same sense of validation can be obtained without resorting to the assumption of transference.
yeah.
“We do not know what is causing your emotional reaction because there are too many complex influences and we have no way of sorting it all out....
aw. but that's no good... not only do we like validation... we like some kind of approximation of an answer too...
> I don't want to sound like a shill for ACT. I have serious problems with it or at least with its founder and the zeitgeist of its core adherents. But the *mindful acceptance* component solves for me a lot problems about therapy.
yeah. i understand.
poster:special_k
thread:628935
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060406/msgs/632445.html