Playing Our Cards Face Up: The Positive Power of Acknowledging Sexual Arousal within the Therapeutic Setting

Therapist disclosure, or as we define it-acknowledgement, in the therapeutic setting has a sorted history. Nowhere is this more true than in the area of the therapist's erotic feelings. This paper utilizes Relational Psychoanalysis to explore the utility of acknowledging the erotic countertransference. From a relational paradigm, all therapy is disclosure and therefore conscious acknowledgment becomes a necessary factor in successful therapy. Two therapy vignettes provide examples in which acknowledgement of erotic feelings is utilized. Specific challenges for therapists from Christian backgrounds are discussed and a new hermeneutic of ethical boundaries is presented as determined by the therapeutic relationship.From the outset we wish for the reader to know that (a) we place ourselves within the Relational School of Psychoanalysis and that our view of countertransference, though built upon historical psychoanalytic theory, is reconceptualized in the Relational model as a co-created experience and is an essential part of the therapeutic dialogue, (b) all of therapy is disclosure or as will be clarified in this paper, acknowledgement of what is known, (c) particular Christian sexual ethics may inhibit the idea of acknowledgment in the therapeutic setting (d) as it is also controversial among psychoanalytic theorists/practitioners, we contend that erotic arousal should be acknowledged in a psychotherapeutic encounter and will discuss the varied theories concerning this issue, and (e) using a Relationally Psychoanalytic stance in psychotherapy requires a reconsideration of ethical behavior when dealing with sexual arousal in the therapeutic relationship.All Therapy is DisclosureWe believe that all therapy is disclosure. We define disclosure as acknowledging and speaking to that which is conscious, and unconscious, that has now emerged to awareness within ourselves and within the therapeutic relationship. There is no such thing as a blank screen, analytic neutrality or objectivity. Therapy is not about deciding when and if to disclose, because everything the therapist does and does not do is a form of disclosure. Therapy is therefore a readiness to speak to material that emerges in the relational dyad and the capacity to sustain the inquiry when the acknowledgement of what is happening is brought into conscious awareness. Bromberg (2006) writes,Because unconscious material is held to be co-constructed rather than revealed, the analyst's role is not to avoid personal participation in the process, but continually to monitor and use the immediate and residual effects of his personal participation as an inherent part of his stance, (p. 131)The therapist's experience is linked to the patient in both subjective and intersubjective ways. Bromberg (2006) believes that unconscious affects, thoughts and fantasies are in both patient and therapist so they must be processed in order to bring them into symbolization through language (p. 131).Transference-countertransference enactment is the process by which patients' selfstates, or what Bromberg (2006) calls traumaderived emotion schemas (p. 136), make themselves known. But because conscious and unconscious affects, thoughts and fantasies are both co-created in the analytic dyad and non-linear, the therapist must put his/her own experience into words in order to make sense of the enactment. As Bromberg (2006) states, patient's pressure to force the analyst to give up his right to privacy is organized not simply by a need to know the analyst, but by a wish to know what the analyst knows about the patient but has dissociated (p. 145).This creates a situation that Owen Renik (2006) refers to as flying blind. Flying blind is admitting that all we really have is our experience of being with the patient, and subsequently we don't know with certainty what will provide a corrective experience for him/her. While we can never know all our blind spots, make no mistake; patients will see many of them. …