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From: Howard Baker
Date: 20 Mar 1997
Time: 23:43:43
It does seem clinically that disruptions when they lead to restorations lead to opportunities for growth. It seems to me that one way to understand the most useful of these is that an event occurred in the transference that in some ways recapitualtes some childhood disruption. Thus, there is a recreation of something very close to the precise empathic failures that the patient endured in childhood. This offers an oportunity to capture those events in an affectively genuinely way, to relive the moment. If there is no real repair, the patient will merely experience another version of the same old thing. If, however, the therapist is able to decenter from the situation and recognize what lead to the disruption, the "same old thing" will not recur. There will be a new experience. Moreover, because the patient is in a state that recapitulates the old script (model scene, invariant organizing principle) they are afforded an opportunity to almost recreate the old trama/failure. The crucial word is almost. The "repitition compulsion" almost repeats. However, because the therapist breaks the script, and because the affect and cognitions are so close to the old, problematic transference, a new outcome can genuinely be experienced. The same old, same old nearly happens and is then transformed. In ordinary development, where new patterns, transferences, schemas are being formed that will organize future experience, optimal frustration is not necessary or even relevant. When we are trying to help our patients alter schemas that are already laid down and must be altered in a more useful, functional way, the patient must have a new experience emerge from the old one. Thus then need for the frustration that leads to the empathic rupture and loss of the selfobject transference.