Moving Beyond the Comfort Zone in Psychotherapy

Making emotional contact and inviting patients to use therapeutic relationships for their relational and developmental aims is a risky and intimate proposition. But, as the author of this book argues, therapists must be willing to engage deeply with patients to work from within the relationship extending the therapeutic relationship to reach the private experience of self and other and offer new relational experience. Moving beyond traditional thinking, the author presents a relational approach that integrates psychoanalytic thinking with the latest findings from infant research to give therapists the theoretical framework to orient the treatment and maintain psychic equilibrium and safety during times of arousing and destabilizing affect and relational scenarios. A therapeutic stance, which is fluid and open to intrapsychic and interpersonal influence, allows for the experience and elaboration of complex unconscious affects and shifting points of identification. Compelling clinical narratives bring the reader into the consulting room and show how the therapist may forge deep emotional connection within a bounded therapeutic relationship that relies upon mutual influence and self-revelation and opens up relational space to ultimately rearrange a patient's experience of self and other.