Spielraum und Rahmen

It seems inconceivable for an analytic psychotherapy not to fail if its framework remains unquestioned and unchallenged or if its framework is too tight. Fear of failure and of making mistakes as well as being ashamed of missing superego rules are likely to extinguish therapists’ freedom of action and their scope of discretion. They cannot provide their patients with what these need to develop. Permitting insecurity, doubt and nescience will in contrast foster an effective therapy process. The therapist’s capability to permanently negotiate the framework of the analytic psychotherapy (with its setting and abstinence) seems essential. Occasionally, going beyond the scope suits to unfold freedom of action. This book is about therapies with freedom of action and framework complementing one another as well as therapies that interrupted due to the therapist’s lack of freedom of action. In both scenarios, the relationships between therapist and patient are being analysed with specifically looking not only into how the freedom of action evolves within the therapist or the patient, resp. but also considering the underlying psychodynamics and the processes of transference and countertransference. In another chapter, therapies with “repeating” patients are described; in these cases, freedom of action unfolded in the course of time.