Love and Hate in the Analytic Setting
By (author) Glen O. Gabbard
Publication date:
07 July 1977Length of book:
300 pagesPublisher
Jason Aronson, Inc.ISBN-13: 9781568216713
Passionate feelings of love and hate are stirred in psychotherapy. Paradoxically, these passions may either undermine the therapist catastrophically or serve as the crucible in which profound understanding is forged. Transferences and countertransferences of love and hate occur on a spectrum that includes unobjectionable negative and positive feelings, relatively benign forms of love and hate, and more malignant, intractable versions of love and hate that present formidable challenges to the therapist. Each of these variations is explored in different chapters of this book. Gender configurations, gender fluidity, adolescent transferences, the link between love and lust, and passive forms of hating are among the topics discussed. Most of all, the author, noted psychoanalyst Glen Gabbard, depicts what it is like to be in the eye of the hurricane when passions are aroused. He provides a practical yet theoretically sophisticated guide to the management of love and hate as they are experienced by both patient and therapist.
Love and Hate in the Analytic Setting is a major contribution to the psychoanalytic dialogue. This book establishes Glen Gabbard as the leading authority on the containment, management, and interpretation of experiences of intense love, pathologicalerotization, and hate in the transference-countertransference. Gabbard is without peer in his capacity to provide an undogmatic framework of ideas and a body of vivid clinical material with which the analytic clinician might productively navigate the treacherous waters of intense transference and countertransference love, hate, and sexualization. Dr. Gabbard candidly discusses the delicate line that he has had to learn to walk in his effort to listen to, and yet not act upon, the Siren song of the lovingor sexualized transference-countertransference and the lure of the patient's invitation to join in his/her hate-filled internal object world. Since, for Gabbard, transference is inseparable from countertransference and the intrapsychic inseparable from the intersubjective, there is no place outside of the analytic interaction from which to view the analytic drama safely. Gabbard brilliantly and courageously discusses the ways in which the psychodynamic psychotherapist must learn to contain and work with