This question was asked during a teleconference with Irvin Yalom by transactional analyst Vadim Petrovsky. In response, the psychotherapy guru spoke about his own psychoanalysis, referred to the qualities of a good therapist formulated by Carl Rogers, and opened the documentary basis of the book Liar on the Couch.
Vadim Petrovsky: You spoke about the joy that you experience when you not only touch the intimate world of another person, but also enter it. And I know this feeling. But there are many people who would like to enter my intimate world. I think you are familiar with this situation. How do you feel when this happens to you?
Irvin Yalom: You raise the very important question of how open a therapist can be. You can stick to the old Freudian approach he called the «blank screen». To tell the truth, when I started psychoanalysis, it was in the late 1950s, I had a very orthodox female analyst, I didn’t even see her, I was lying on the couch, and she was sitting behind me. She wanted to become invisible in some way. The idea behind this is that if we do not see the therapist, we begin to attribute some ideas to him, to project them onto him. For example, we begin to feel for him the same feelings that we had for significant figures in our lives, say, for parents. There is a transfer, and the analyst thus encourages it. I went through 700 hours of this kind of psychoanalysis, and I learned one thing: this is an exceptionally bad model of therapy. I have always felt that it is much more important for patients to have a genuine encounter with another person.
There was a psychotherapist Carl Rogers in America who did a lot in this direction. He argued that there are three things a good therapist should do. He must be genuine (sincere, not fake) in relation to the patient, be himself. He must develop empathy for the patient. And he should also have positive unconditional acceptance and support towards this patient. No less than a thousand studies, experiments, and dissertations have confirmed that this is the difference between a good and mediocre psychotherapist. So I take those three points very seriously.
I try to be as authentic as possible with my patients. I tend to be much more open to patients than other therapists. Therapists are afraid to tell patients something superfluous about themselves. But if the patient asks if you are married and have children, I always answer honestly. What is so secret about this? But therapists are afraid that if they start answering personal questions from patients, how far will they have to go? Patients will start asking more and more intimate questions, will start wondering how often you masturbate or something like that. But patients won’t do that. And if they do, then you always have a powerful therapy tool that you can use. You may ask: “Tell me, what is your benefit here? Why do you want to embarrass me?» And then you can go deeper into your relationship. So I can tell patients a lot about myself.
- What is transference and why psychoanalysis is impossible without it
- “Happiness is the absence of regrets”: 5 quotes from Irvin Yalom
Can a therapist be too outspoken? Well, maybe yes. I wrote a book about it, Liar on the Couch. And in this book, I describe an experiment where the therapist thinks, “What if I reveal everything about myself to the next patient? Will I be completely frank? Read it, it will tell you a lot about self-disclosure. In fact, the plot of this book is based on an experiment conducted by one of Freud’s colleagues, a man with a Hungarian name, Sandor Ferenczi. He experimented a lot with different types of therapy, much more than Freud. And then one day he decided that he would try mutual analysis. One of his patients was himself an analyst, so for one hour Ferenczi analyzed his patient, and the next hour the patient analyzed him. And he described this experiment in his diaries. And my book Liar on the Couch is a modern retelling of Ferenczi’s old experiment: if we reveal everything about ourselves, it will lead to. Did I manage to answer your question?
Vadim Petrovsky: Yes, thank you very much, I read the book «Liar on the Couch», I must open up to you, this book has greatly influenced my life. Thank you!