Self-Confrontation Through Video

Confrontation leads to the challenge of confusing assumptions, double-binding ambiguities, denials, blind spots and contradictions. The exposure through self-confrontation of the existence and nature of conscious or unconscious resistance or of an impasse, in therapy as in life, can lead to its diagnosis, understanding and resolution, as communication between patient and therapist leads to clarity, compromise and hopefully, to change. As anxiety and alienation were the most significant concepts of the preceding decade, confrontation has perhaps become the most significant social and psychiatric concept and system involving us today.

The coming of age of television in psychiatry has provided us with a tool which can profoundly expand our understanding of self-image(s) and self-concept(s). Horney¹ was acutely interested in the function and clarification of the neurotically glorified self-image in order to undermine it during psychoanalytic treatment so that a real self and self-image could evolve. In recent times, Erikson,² Goffman³ and Laing⁴ have been concerned with the development of identity and before them, Freud,⁵ Buber,⁶ Sullivan,⁷ Schilder,⁸ Allport,⁹ James,¹⁰ Tillich¹¹ and others had expressed interest in body image and self-concept.

Garner¹² has reviewed confrontation methods used in psychotherapy which range from a) Mesmer's¹³ hypnotic approach, to b) symptom-removal and behavioral change through the more active analytic approaches of Ferenczi,¹⁴ Reich,¹⁵ Alexander,¹⁶ Rosen¹⁷ and Frankl,¹⁸ which might be accompanied by insight and corrective emotional experiences, and c) then discussed the confrontational approach of today's behaviorists such as Wolpe.¹⁹

In 1952, Kubie²⁰ stated, “The effects of facing an auditory and visual image of one's own psychological activities have never been examined systematically. We do not know if it would be therapeutic or noxious, and whether it would bypass the resistances to insight or increase them. Many con