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In this case commentary, I offered my musings related to what I imagined thinking about if I encountered Colette in psychotherapy, highlighting potential interpersonal dynamics that could infuse the treatment relationship. I explored several clinical issues, including themes of race, repetition of abuse, enactments, working with trauma, and other unconscious dynamics at play in the treatment of traumatized patients. These thoughts were provided from the perspective of a young, White therapist who practices from a relational position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The clinician's experiences of race outside of the treatment room contribute to the formation of a racialized self, which influences clinical work with all clients notwithstanding race. Multiracial individuals at times must balance their external physical presentation-and the corresponding race-related categories that others place on them-with their own internally constructed racial identifications. The mechanisms of identification and disidentification can provide safety for the multiracial individual. How can clinicians effectively acknowledge their own identifications and disidentifications as lenses for seeing the multiracial person's racialized self and selves so as to more effectively work with the multiracial? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The experience of teaching a graduate seminar on aging led us to adapt and augment our teaching perspectives and approaches to help students gain insight into their own limitations in working with older adults. Role-play exercises helped students bring their own family of origin, personal experiences, biases, and beliefs about older adults into bold relief. New-found insights from these lived experiences included better understanding and appreciation for transference and countertransference issues, which are often overlooked or given short shrift in our training and work with older adults. Long considered not suitable for serious clinical work, older adults are increasingly asking for more than just life-sustaining case management, yet many clinicians feel limited in their abilities when they accidentally or unintentionally encounter older adults or adjunctive elder family members in their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Lacanian perspective privileges speech as the motor of cure in the treatment of this borderline patient. In assuming such an ethical position, the clinician fostered a symbolic transference marked by an outburst of rage that signified a rupture of her entanglement with her mother. In this way, the clinician's promotion of 'full speech' breached the patient's defensive need for 'invisibility' and led her to produce a socially useful project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The college experience represents a major life transition from adolescence to adulthood, which is often fraught with challenges in relationships, identity formation, and communal belonging. Steady generational changes in self and relational identity have led to younger generations that increasingly embody a more interpersonal and less individualistic conception of the human person, with less rigid norms and greater openness to diversity. These characteristics make college students an appropriate target population for interpersonal psychotherapies based on mutuality of process. Relational therapy is a particularly fitting treatment modality for college students, as it focuses on these very qualities. This article reviews the current literature on relational theory in psychological and social work practice, describing its principal tenets and concepts, and applying this theory to clinical work with college students to reveal applications for constructive practice with this population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transferences from patients' everyday lives, or extra-therapeutic transferences, provide rich material in psychoanalytic psychotherapy practice, but the literature has mainly ignored this topic, reserving the term transference for the therapy relationship. While references to the therapy relationship may also be present or emerge from this material, at times explicit interpretations of extra therapeutic transferences are appropriate, without reference to the therapy relationship. Through an extensive literature review and case illustrations from the author's practice, this paper suggests that the concept of extra-therapeutic transference should be revisited and integrated with a broader understanding of transference, to bring theory more in line with actual practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The understanding of transference and countertransference has changed a great deal since Freud introduced the terms. A case example indicates one way the patient's and clinician's past experiences and expectations interact to create a here and now relationship that is highly influenced by transference/countertransference. The understanding of both terms as aspects of a mutually constituted interaction has practice implications for the treatment of adult survivors of abuse who have a somatoform disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the usefulness of attachment theory in working with adults in psychotherapy. There are four classifications of attachment status in adults: secure attachment, and three types of insecure attachment: dismissing, preoccupied, and disorganized. These categories do not conform to standard diagnostic entities. I discuss examples of the three insecure attachment categories and the likely transference and countertransference configurations that may occur in each category. These categories provide an additional way for therapists to understand and to respond to the needs of their clients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on supervision discusses processes occurring in the supervisor-supervisee relationship that are similar to, and have parallels in, a parent-child relationship. This slipping from the one type of relationship into the other can interfere with the process of supervision. This shift to the supervisee feeling like a child and the supervisor like a parent is liable to be the natural outcome of transference and counter-transference. The aim of this paper is to examine the pseudo-parental role of the supervisor, in order to make supervisors more aware of, and alert to, the possibility that their supervision of young workers may slip into a parent-child mode, to identify critical points where parental feelings may intrude on supervision, and to suggest a useful support model that can help prevent this intrusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Daydreams, long recognized as containers of unarticulated, unrecognized and/or unconscious material, can be subtle but powerful tools for introducing clients to the process of exploring internal experience. They offer a crucial, relatively non-threatening path to self-understanding for individuals who come into therapy without the capacity for introspection, tolerance of affect, and sense of agency that are requisite for the process of psychodynamic psychotherapy. In part because they are often available to conscious awareness, they are an amazingly useful medium through which to help many of these clients gain access to their internal world. They encourage the development of the capacity to symbolize, to play, and eventually to embrace the "potential space" of internal experience that makes it possible to have a rich and fulfilling life in the "external" world. In this article, the author introduces the use of daydreams in psychodynamic psychotherapy, focusing specifically on three specific areas: resistance, somatization, and transference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents the manner in which psychological treatment, with its attentiveness to the vicissitudes of the unfolding selfobject transference, gradually enabled a patient to contain and articulate painful affect states. The patient's passionate relationship with food, strikingly illustrated in the clinical material, including her dreams, endowed eating with the functions of an idealized selfobject. Over the course of treatment, she seemed to traverse a psychic bridge that took her from an isolated reliance on food through a more focal awareness of her body and her feelings, to an investment in, and capacity for, deepened relationships with other people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sibling dimensions of transference and countertransference have been neglected in favor of a parent-child transference model. This preference for the parent-child model reflected the paternalistic, positivist assumptions of traditional psychoanalysis. Developments of collaborative and postmodern psychoanalytic therapies make the sibling transference more recognizable and understandable. This paper emphasizes the positive sibling transference; possible directions for further exploration of the sibling transference dynamic are indicated. Clinical illustrations are given from child and family therapies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]