A motivational systems approach to the clinical experience.
A conception of the self and five motivational systems is applied to clinical psychoanalysis. Each motivational system develops in infancy from innate and learned patterns in response to a basic need, and each involves particular affects. Each motivational system contributes patterns from which important transferences evolve. At any given moment, motives derived from one or another system dominate a person's experience, motives from the other system being subsidiary or dormant. We describe the manner in which these concepts contribute to an explanation of foreground-background relations during analysis, and how analysts and analysands construct model scenes to give meaning to information acquired by empathic listening. We conclude with a clinical vignette illustrating the application of these concepts to the patient's transference and the analyst's response in the intersubjective realm of an analytic enactment and verbal exchange.
Georgetown University.
J D
JD
Lichtenberg
A R
AR
Kindler
D000328:Adult; D004532:Ego; D004645:Empathy; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D009042:Motivation; D009769:Object Attachment; D010553:Personality Development; D010554:Personality Disorders / Q000523:psychology / Q000628:therapy; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory; D011575:Psychoanalytic Therapy; D013598:Systems Theory; D014167:Transference, Psychology