THE MAN WHO WOULD BE EVERYTHING (TO EVERYONE): THE UNCONSCIOUS REALITIES AND FANTASIES OF PSYCHIC TRUTH AND CHANGE.
This paper explores the psychoanalyst's dilemmas in treating a man who came for analysis as a self-identified compulsive liar. The decision as to whether or not to treat this man, and how to do so without getting caught up in a web of deceit and manipulation, raises issues about the nature of unconscious fantasy and its relationship to psychic truth. Therapeutic action as it involves the activation of multiple internal self-other configurations and their psychodynamic relationship to each other is also explored.
Faculty member and supervisor in the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy and is a founding vice-president of the International Association for Relational Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; she is also a founding board member of the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies.
Jody Messler
JM
Davies
D000328:Adult; D008192:Deception; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011369:Professional-Patient Relations; D011575:Psychoanalytic Therapy / Q000379:methods*; D014473:Unconscious, Psychology
Truth; analytic interaction; analytic relationship; internal objects; interpretation; lying; psychic change; self states; self-object organization; self-reflective capacity; therapeutic action; transference-countertransference