In response to your asking for suggestions re: attraction in therapy. I have just written a book (In Session: The bond between women and their therapists -- W.H. Freeman, April 1999) that looks at this issue (as well as a number of other boundary and transference issues) from the client's point of view. I surveyed close to 300 women in therapy. IN doing my research I attempted to find any studies that looked for the connection between attraction, love, erotic feelings and therapy effectiveness and could find none. The research on attraction in general is mighty weak -- mostly case studies and theory-bound appraisals. My book may be useful to you in at least identifying some of the issues related to attraction from clients' perspective. I asked women to describe in great detail what they felt, thought, fantasized, when in situations where there was attraction or sexual acting out. The stories in my book suggest that any sort of intense sexual attraction particularly when the therapist was even subtly seductive was very destructive to the therapy. The ambiguity of the situation could make it even more maddening than a therapist's outright declaration of feeling -- although that was almost always destructive as well. By the way, I'm a medical journalist, not a therapist, which I thought I should let you know.
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