The therapeutic relationship in psychiatric hospital treatment.
The therapeutic relationship between staff members and patients is a crucial healing ingredient of psychoanalytically informed hospital treatment. The author describes how this relationship facilitates each patient's repetition of early object relations, which are reenacted with staff members through splitting and projective identification. During regular meetings, staff members work together to understand and integrate the various projected parts of a patient's psyche, which are then reintrojected by the patient through both interpretive and noninterpretive aspects of the therapeutic relationship. The author concludes by describing the deleterious effects on this process of current economic and regulatory forces.
Gabbard
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Adult Services, Menninger Clinic, Topeka, KS 66601-0829.
D000328:Adult; D003379:Countertransference; D005260:Female; D006760:Hospitalization; D006801:Humans; D009723:Nurse-Patient Relations; D009769:Object Attachment; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D011575:Psychoanalytic Therapy; D012931:Social Environment; D014167:Transference, Psychology