Seduction, Surrender, and Transformation: Emotional Engagement in the Analytic Process

Abstract

What are the actual clinical implications of a relational approach to psychoanalytic therapy? Does recent theorizing about mutuality and intersubjectivity really change the way analysts work with patients? In her answer to these questions, the author calls on analytic therapists to show some emotion!. Seduction, Surrender and Transformation demonstrates how interpersonal psychoanalysis obliges analysts to engage their patients with geniune emotional responsiveness, so that not only the patient but the analyst too is open to ongoing transformation through the analytic experience. In so doing, the analyst moves from the position of an interpreting observer to that of an active participant and facilitator whose affective communications enable the patient to acquire basic self-trust along with self-knowledge. In her previous book, Power of Countertransference, Maroda was among the first analytic therapists to argue for the legitimacy of the analyst's self-disclosures. Here she further develops her interpersonal approach by grounding her technical recommendations in a clinical theory of affect. Drawing on the current literature on affect, Maroda argues that psychological change occurs through affect-laden interpersonal processes. Given that most patients in psychotherapy have problems with affect management, the completing of cycles of affective communication between therapist and patient becomes a vitally important aspect of the therapeutic enterprise. Through emotionally open responses to their patients and careful use of patient-prompted self-disclosures, analysts can facilitate affect regulation responsibly and constructively, with the emphasis always remaining on the patients' experience. Moments of mutual surrender - the honest emotional giving over of patient to analyst and analyst to patient - epitomize the emotionally intense interpersonal experiences that lead to enduring intrapsychic change. The author shares with the reader how her own personality affects her thinking and her work. Indeed, she believes her theoretical and clinical preferences are emblematic of the way in which the analyst's subjectivity necessarily shapes theory choice and practice preferences in general. Seduction, Surrender and Transformation is not only a brief for emotional honesty in the analytic relationship, but also a model of the personal openness that, the author argues, psychoanalysis demands of all its practitioners.

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