Her psychiatrist understands her inner ideas and emotions better than anyone. She can say anything to him and he doesn’t criticize her, but just appears to know her more. She feels secure and comforted whenever she sees him. He is sure of just when to hand her a hankie when she’s going to cry, and they share laughs together for the reason that her humorousness is so like his. She finds herself eager for sessions and even wondering what to be dressed in. She daydreams about him and wonders if he feels the same unusual connection to her. Maybe she’s become his favorite patient.

She feels guilty while her partner asks how treatment is going, and tells herself that her emotions about her psychiatrist can’t be true. In the end, she’s paying for his time and hate it, he’s never late with a bill, and there’s no particular discount for these particular emotions.

So what if she’s in love with him? It happens. She didn’t plan it that way. And he may even love her back. Jason Robards was a psychologist in Tender is the Night and married his patient, Jennifer Jones. And in Spellbound, Ingrid Bergman fell in love with her patient Gregory Peck. Maybe she should just come out with it and tell him how she really feels, but what if he rejects her?

This patient’s experiences are typical of what occurs in many forms of psychotherapy that focus on exploring and understanding the patient’s inner psychological life. Known as transference, it means that the patient is transferring feelings she has toward a parent or authority figure, onto the therapist. A therapist who can remain neutral by not expressing his own issues and emotional reactions during treatment will allow the patient to fill in what she imagines to be the therapist’s reaction. When the time comes for the therapist to point out the reality of the relationship, the patient will hopefully gain insight into her distortions, and realize how she transfers past distortions onto other relationships in her life. With the psychiatrist’s help, the patient can come to grips with this pattern, put her distortions into perspective, and move on with her life.

This process can be particularly challenging when the patient’s transference is eroticized. And if the therapist is experiencing emotional issues in his own personal life, it can lead to a dangerous romantic liaison as it is often depicted in films. An ethical, well-trained psychiatrist, however, knows how to deal with his own emotional reactions to his patient’s expressions of transference.

Freud used the term countertransference to refer to the therapist’s emotional responses to a patient during psychotherapy. An effective therapist has the capacity for empathy and will experience countertransference feelings, but should not allow them to interfere with the therapy. In fact, for psychiatrists who maintain perspective on these reactions and their distortions, countertransference offers an important opportunity to explore the patient’s inner emotional world. It helps the therapist understand how the patient’s behaviors affect others in her life, and how these distortions can create dysfunctional interpersonal patterns.

Anyone who has positive or negative feelings towards her psychiatrist during therapy should discuss those feelings, no matter how uncomfortable that discussion may be. For many patients, it provides an opportunity to gain greater understanding of themselves, offering a path to emotional health.

However, some patients can’t handle this kind of exploratory insight-oriented psychotherapy. The child psychiatrist’s silence or probing questions may stir up so much anxiety that it distorts the patient’s reality and imposes other dangers.

The therapy had made her into a really distorted transfer state that she thought I had made love to her with staring into her eyes. Once I realized that her transfer emotions had morphed into dangerously psychotic romantic needs, I rapidly changed my treatment policy. I ended inquiring her past and helped her deal with her present anxieties. I continued to work with this patient for one more month or so, and she improved. I attempted never to stare into her eyes again.

So falling in love together with your psychiatrist is usually a usual part of treatment. Some people can’t deal with it, and a skilled psychiatrist understands how to spot them and help them cope with their problems in the present. For most sufferers, talking about those emotions with the psychoanalyst and learning how they relate to past relationships often speeds up emotional increase, recuperation and health.

Copyright by Lucy, a beautiful girl who likes swimming, shopping online and has a shop with coach rain boots and oakley sunglass.