ABSTRACT
Success in psychotherapy is correlated with the "fit" between patient and therapist, a factor related to attachment. For psychotherapists of any orientation, empathy and building the bond of attachment is our stock-in-trade. When empathy builds the bond of attachment with someone starved for connection, a therapist may inadvertently set him- or herself up to become a victim of a stalker. Because individuals who stalk others suffer from severe attachment disorders, their hunger for attachment motivates them to shadow psychotherapists, which makes being stalked a very real occupational hazard for psychotherapists. This was a painful discovery for me. I was stalked for 11 months, leaving me with post-traumatic stress disorder. After recovering, I deconstructed the experience to understand how and why it happened, and discovered that it was my empathy and compassion that contributed to and maintained the stalking. What I learned from the forensic literature provided the knowledge and confidence needed to end the stalking. In this paper recommendations are made about how to prevent stalking and to halt it if it does happens.
Subject(s)
Empathy/physiology , Object Attachment , Occupational Diseases/etiology , Professional-Patient Relations , Psychotherapy , Stalking/psychology , Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic/etiology , Adult , HumansSubject(s)
Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity/diagnosis , Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity/epidemiology , Feeding and Eating Disorders/diagnosis , Feeding and Eating Disorders/epidemiology , Obesity/diagnosis , Obesity/epidemiology , Adult , Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity/psychology , Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity/therapy , Bulimia Nervosa/diagnosis , Bulimia Nervosa/epidemiology , Comorbidity , Diagnosis, Differential , Feeding and Eating Disorders/psychology , Feeding and Eating Disorders/therapy , Female , Humans , Male , Sex Factors , Treatment Outcome , Young AdultABSTRACT
It has not been fully appreciated that psychoanalysis, in its origins, was both a talking and a writing cure. When Freud instructed his patients to say whatever came to mind, using words to verbalize that which was preconscious replaced the hypnotic technique as the "talking cure" and was the beginning of the psychoanalytic method. Freud used writing to an internal other in his self-analysis, and his free association writing has had an enormous influence on psychoanalysis. This author has introduced writing into the treatment of some patients and has found it invaluable with psychosomatic patients, including those who suffer from eating disorders and self-injury, because they tend to use their bodies rather than words to express emotions. Today's "widening scope" evokes a need to develop newer techniques, especially with patients who are unusually resistant to free associating or whose thinking is presymbolic. Caution must be taken that writing eases the resistance to free association and does not serve as a source of resistance itself, and that it serves creative rather than destructive aims. A little-known event in psychoanalytic history is instructive: E. Pickworth Farrow, a former psychoanalytic patient, devised a self-analytic process through writing down his free associations.
