You are exacty right and state the problem most eloquently. You wrote: 'There is a great difference in acknowledging feelings as valid versus acting them out. I believe many This is really the core of the matter to which you refer. I have seen this myself on several occasions with clients whose former "therapists" seemed unable to distinguish between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. I once heard Own Renik (a leading figure in American Psychoanalysis who often has many important things to say about the process of therapy) say that therapy is so much about helping a patient who is not able to manage what one needs to manange in oneself. This is really a poor paraphrasing of what Renik did say since his exact words won't come to my recollection at the moment. But then he added that if the therapist is also unable to manage it, the patient and the therapist are basically lost. My own opinion is that today there is apparently a large amount of inadequate training (which, in my opinion is what is responsible for these kinds of therapist missteps that you refer to). In fact, I find that today there are a great many persons who practice what they call psychotherapy but that bears almost no rsemblance to anything I have learned to do that is psychotherapy and no resemblance to anything I know about from reading except for the occasional reading when I run across someone's "innovative therapuetic techniques" that are justified only on the basis of some author's claims that the technique "really works." There has been an explosive growth in the number psychotherapists without a corresponding growth in commensurate training opportunities or adequate supervision for training and consultation. This parallels the explosive growth of new computer technology and computer "experts" without a corresponding growth in commensurate training in electrical engineering and computer science. Our world increasingly produces many more "experts" than genuine expertise. The old adage is certainly true today that just because someone is an expert doesn't mean the person knows what s/he is talking about. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that these days almost anything anyone can do or say to another person has been described by some author somewhere as psychotherapy. Standards for therapists are in reality rarely found, and, when found, are more rarely enforced or even unenforceable. Despite this, there is ironically more excellent and sound empirical research on what constitutes competent therapist behaviors than ever before. And there are many more genuinely competent therapists that ever before. The research of Hans Strupp and his associates, for exmaple, is outstanding as well as that of the San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group and many others. Dr. Klein is also someone who pays close attention to what good research has to teach us and especially so in regards to human sexuality, another area in which there is an extraordinary amount of either misinformation or no information about what the best research has to teach us. I wonder if Dr. Klein would comment on the kind of issue you raise about therapeutic mishandling of sexual transference in which therapists effectively teach clients by the therapist's example to fear their feelings, to confuse them with actions, and therefore, in effect, attribute to clients the therapists' (own projected?) expectation that sexual feelings will not be manageable if allowed into consciousness for the sake of practical discussions.
therapists are afraid to validate the sexual or love feelings of their patients due to the perception that
they may be inviting illicit acts."
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