A Thing Apart: Love and Reality in the Therapeutic Partnership (Critical Issues in Psychoanalysis ; 2)

"Is this relationship real?" is a question therapists often hear from their patients. We know it is real, but certainly different from other relationships. Other authors have described it as an analog of the parent-child relationship. In this ambitiously integrative work, the distinguished analyst and respected teacher, Dr. Irving Steingart, offers a new model of the analytic relationship, one that has no analog in ordinary life. In this model the patient's psychic reality is of paramount importance. It is a reality that is collaboratively discovered, not merely invented or narratively created. This model offers a way to understand the love that develops between therapist and patient, a love that is not based on transference, but on a love of truth and on an understanding of the patient's psychic reality.Throughout, Steingart uses clinical material to clarify his ideas. He also makes use of current study in several fields with which psychotherapy has a natural interface in order to demonstrate a congruence. This provides further support for his contention that the experiences of reality and love, as they operate in the treatment relationship, indeed mark it as "a thing apart."