One relic of older, Freudian-style psychotherapies which is gradually falling off the radar screen is the “blank screen” form of psychotherapy – that in which the therapist interacts minimally with the patient, discloses minimal amounts of things about himself to the patient, and redirects any questions directed to the therapist about himself toward the patient by saying, “Why do you ask that?”  Research has shown that the “blank screen” technique actually increases anxiety in the client and makes the client worse, rather than better.  When queried about what traits in the therapist the patient deems most helpful for healing patients consistently rank self-disclosure as the single most important factor in their healing (see Learning Psychotherapy, by Bernard Beitman and Dongmei Yue, New York:  Norton, p. 39).  Self-disclosure means that the therapist acknowledges faults, just like any other human being, and allows targeted, limited self-revelation to occur to allow the patient to identify with the therapist.  However, therapists, when queried on the issue of self-disclosure, ranked self-disclosure far down the list of traits which they think are helping the patient.   It is this disconnect between what the patient is experiencing as most helpful and what the therapist thinks is most helpful which is addressed by the latest research.

This newer technique of therapy which embraces limited, targeted self-disclosure is called, “intersubjectivity theory,” and is found in the newer literature in psychoanalysis.  For more information about intersubjectivity theory, talk with Dr. Firnberg.  You may also check the literature emerging from the newer analytic institutes, such as the Newport Psychoanalytic Institute (www.npi.edu), or the Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis (www.icpla.edu or www.icpny.edu).  You may also check out books such as, Relational Psychoanalysis:  The Emergence of a Tradition, ed. Stephen Mitchell & Lewis Aron (Hillsdale, NJ:  Analytic Press, 1999), or Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis, by Stephen A. Mitchell (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard Univ. Press, 1988).