Management of Countertransference with Borderline Patients
A clinical guide to using countertransference in work with borderline patients.
There have been many fine books on the borderline personality, but this is the first work that intelligently addresses the effect of borderline patients on the psychotherapist or psychoanalyst who works with them.
Gabbard and Wilkinson set out a systematic way of working with the strong emotional reactions that arise in treating borderline patients. Rather than treating these reactions as lapses to be corrected, the book reads them as information about the patient and shows how the therapist can hold and use them within the work. The account rests on object relations ideas, with projective identification and the pull toward enactment doing much of the explanatory work.
Much of the material is clinical. Vignettes trace recurring feelings, from rescue wishes to anger and dread, and follow how they shift over the course of a treatment. Separate chapters take up gender in the consulting room and the particular pressures of working while pregnant. Throughout, the authors tie countertransference management to the practical task of holding boundaries and avoiding the violations that such treatments can provoke.
It was published in 1994 by American Psychiatric Press.
About the authors
Glen Owens Gabbard
Glen O. Gabbard is an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, born in 1949. He is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and a training and supervising analyst at the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies. His work centres on psychodynamic psychiatry, professional boundary violations, and the psychotherapies. He has authored or edited many books and papers, including texts on psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, physician health, and depictions of mental illness in film.
Sallye Wilkinson
Sallye M. Wilkinson is a clinical psychologist (Ph.D.) and psychoanalyst who worked at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, where she served as a senior psychologist and taught in its school for psychiatry. She trained at the Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis. With Glen O. Gabbard she wrote Management of Countertransference with Borderline Patients (1994), and she has written on therapeutic self-disclosure with borderline patients. She co-edited Analysts in the Trenches: Streets, Schools, War Zones.
Details
- 1994
- American Psychiatric Publishing
- American Psychiatric Publishing
- 272
- 9780880485630