Project Description
This brilliant and helpfully clarifying article by Lavinia Gomez tackles the difficult theme 'humanistic or psychodynamic' in a non-dogmatic and fairly comprehensive fashion. Lavinia poses some challenging questions, especially for integrative therapists: how free and fluid can we allow ourselves to be in terms of combining, mixing and matching different therapeutic traditions, and what are the possible negative effects of switching approaches, especially in terms of the client's sense of containment? She proposes that once the transference has constellated (or we have allowed it to by taking what she calls a relational stance 'opposite' the client), we are not just free to switch back into a humanistic stance 'alongside' the client. I agree with her that such switching is likely to be read by the client's unconscious as an anxious or defensive avoidance of the transference dynamic. I do, however, argue against one of Lavinia's central conclusions, based on a different interpretation of what we might mean by 'containment' and 'enactment' - see my response to her article: Is it Possible to Integrate Humanistic Techniques into a Transference-Countertransference Perspective? (2004).
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