For The Other Side of the Couch: The Healing Bond in Psychiatry

 

Excerpts from the Introduction, The Healing Bond

 

…I hope this volume may serve as a reminder of what must always remain the central issue: that all effective psychotherapy grows for the unique and healing bond between therapist and patient.

 

This book is about the nature of this healing bond, in all its uniqueness, complexity, and paradox. Much of what I have written inevitably applies to good psychotherapists in any profession, whether psychiatry, psychology, social work, or psychiatric nursing…

 

Excerpts from the Epilogue: What to Look for in Good Treatment

 

…This book is not a cookbook, but it is a guide to what you can expect to find in good therapy. In the paragraphs below, I have listed a number of crucial points in regard to the therapeutic relationship and what you can expect from treatment….
 

 

THE HEALING BOND

Your relationship with your therapist is crucial. Although it may have its ups and downs over the course of treatment, you should feel the therapist is really listening to you, with total concentration. Therapists should not be distracted, uninterested, or hurried….

 

The therapist should never initiate or accept a sexual relationship with you….

 

You should feel that the therapist understands you, at least most of the time, and often seems in tune with your feelings in a gut way, as if from the inside. Indeed, you may never have had an experience quite like this before….
 

 

 

CHANGES

1. Intellectual insight is never enough. Expect to feel better and behave differently, even if the changes are initially small. Remember, you came into treatment because you wanted your life to be better….

 

2. You should begin to show some kind of change rapidly….

 

3. If nothing in your life changes after six months, or if you feel at any time that treatment isn’t going as it should, talk with your therapist about a consultation. If your therapist consistently opposes a consultation, interpret this as a very bad sign. And get a consultation….”

 

 

 

Note: A chapter of The Other Side of the Couch has been included in Inside Therapy: Illuminating Writing about Therapists, Patients and Psychotherapy, (ed. Ilana Rabinowitz) alongside writing by Erich Fromm, Theordore, Reik, Irvin Yalom, and others.