Re: On Reaching Professional Conclusions

You wrote:

"Putting the "legal" aspect aside..."

First off, there is not such thing as a responsible citizen, and thus, by extension, no such thing as a responsible psychotherapist, putting aside legal aspects to any part of our life. A proper understanding of just what the word "legal" means is this: it is the barely minimal level of moral accountability that a society can enforce.

So to put aside legal aspects of anything is to put aside the most minimal moral considerations that every responsible citizen of any society should be considering. There is a huge problem today (descirbed in "The Unconscious Civilization" by John Ralston Saul) of psychologing our life such that we have come to falsely think (unconscously or tacitly) that it may be possible to live in a just social order without concerning ourselves with matters associated with being responsible social citizens--as if one's private mental health and personal psychology were all one needed to be concerned with in order to happy and sane.

The proliferation of the profession of psychotherapy has been accompanied by a corresponding decline in the quality and quantity of responsible citizenship participation because of the very mistaken tacit belief that we can all have a viable social order just by having everyone take care of his or her own psychological stuff. NOT! We must be socially involved and responsible citizens as well--that includes psychotherapists.

I thus would suggest that if more persons, including more psychotherapists, VERY RARELY put legal issues aside when discussing their work and their personal problems, we would not be having a discussion about possible sexual misconduct of psychotherapists.

You wrote:

"To be more specific, is anyone willing to validate that this [transference and countertransference manifestations associated with loving and sexual feelings that occur in the personal setting of a psychotherapist's conultation session] does indeed occur in the context of NOT putting these feelings into "action"? "

Well I certainly have no difficulty acknowledging that such t/c manifestations are a necessary part of almost all human interactions. To not so acknowledge is to impede the process of studying and exploring those reactions so that their meaning can be incorporated into discussions of what significant emotional and interpersoanl issues underlie them.

To not acknowlege such manifestations is to not think about them sufficiently so that acting them out becomes more likely. That which is important to us that we cannot discuss is more likely to then be manifestated in action-symptoms rather than explored constructively in discussions. If this subject of t/c-sex/love-reactions is not acknowleged at this professional forum, it most certainly is acknowledged in many, many, many books in the professional literature on psychotherapy.

Just two that come immediately to mind are Herbert Strean's book "Therapists Who Have Sex With Their Patients" (Strean has treated many therapists who have this acting-out symtom) and Karen Maroda's book "The Power of Countertransference" in which she discusses the many possible non-sexual meanings that a therapist's sexual feelings for a patient may have. The literature on the treatment of patients who were sexually abused as youngsters is replete with references to this issue and the importance of therapists noticing their own feelings so that they can help patients (and themselves--therapists themselves) understand the meanings of what is happening so that neither the patient nor the therapist will be likely to act out destructively.

If anyone thinks this issue is not being addressed by the psychotherapy profession, I would suggest one reads the profession's abundant literature on psychotherapeutic technique and, especially, the many dozens of books now available on the issue of countertransference in general. There are many, many such books published, for example, by Jason Aronson publishers.

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