Word: therapist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...book, Langs conducted three- to four-hour interviews with 20 volunteers who had been in treatment with a total of 47 different therapists representing a range of schools from Gestalt and group to classical psychoanalysis. "Not one of these experiences," Langs writes, "seems to have been free of self-contradictory, unrealistic, out-of-control behaviors and interventions on the part of the therapist. Using rather gross measures, one might say that in general the therapists were responsible for three times as many incidents of overtly inappropriate behavior as their patients...
Most had been overtly manipulated or even abused by at least one therapist. One male therapist caustically rebuked a female patient for not trying to seduce him. A respected psychoanalyst had an affair with the lover of one of his patients, then lied about it, announcing that the patient was projecting his unresolved Oedipal fantasies upon an innocent therapist. Two female therapists behaved seductively to female patients, and one of them conducted a session while lying in bed in her nightgown. During a Gestalt group-therapy session, a deeply troubled man was goaded into attempting intercourse with a woman, then...
Many of these patients overlooked or minimized the abuses of therapists and doggedly remained in treatment. The reason, says Langs, is that the evidence of what the therapist is doing is too threatening for the conscious mind to accept. Patients file the information away unconsciously and begin to deal with it in dreams and feedback to their therapists. In a sense, says Langs, the patient and therapist switch roles, with the patient taking on the responsibility of dealing with the therapist's problems. One patient, for example, dreamed that he took his therapist to a restaurant and was not sure...
Such gains, however, are usually short term. They are often based on the patient's feeling of superiority to an unethical therapist or simply a sense of relief that he has been able to avoid confronting his own problems by the therapist's antics. Often, says the author, therapist and patient collude to keep each other's destructive and frightening impulses at bay. Writes Langs: "Patients will often go from one disturbed therapist to another, seeking a form of madness that is more comfortably suited to their own mad needs and defenses." Virtually every patient in Langs' study who left...
Langs thinks the "overwhelming responsibilities" of therapists push even some of the best-intentioned into imposing their own madness on therapy | sessions. Many, he says, "function well in their own lives, then come into the office and express their own mad concerns." Under the heading of mad therapies, Langs, a strict Freudian, includes all the sunny, upbeat treatments that are based on reassuring patients of their wonderful qualities. Some therapists in Langs' study assured their patients that their husbands or wives were the really crazy people. After a terrifying nightmare, one patient was told by his therapist that his dream...