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It is a common occurrence in psychotherapy for a patient to erroneously acknowledge someone other than the therapist as the source of a psychotherapeutic interpretation or observation. This misidentified source is usually given as a friend, relative, book, or movie. The patient typically reports that he has made an important discovery about himself after reading a book, talking with a friend, etc. This “discovery” is readily recognized by the therapist as a past interpretation or observation he had presented to the patient. In this paper the term “false-acknowledgment phenomenon” will be used to refer to the unconscious mechanism of misidentifying, or falsely acknowledging the source of a psychotherapeutic interpretation or observation.
Although most psychotherapists are familiar with this phenomenon, little definition or clarification of the dynamics involved is available in the psychotherapy literature. It is described in only one of the standard psychotherapy texts reviewed (An Introduction to Psychotherapy), and one interpretation is offered. In this text Tarachow discusses the difficulties that obsessive-compulsive personalities have in being “appreciative.” The authors are of the opinion that the false-acknowledgment phenomenon is frequently experienced as threatening to inexperienced therapists and that even experienced therapists find it difficult to interpret this phenomenon to their patients. Many psychotherapists questioned by the authors had not seriously considered its potential therapeutic implications.
The following are brief examples of the false-acknowledgment phenomenon taken from the authors’ experiences.
Case The patient was a fifty-two-year-old business executive who had been married for twenty years. He had been in therapy for eight months for treatment of an obsessive-compulsive neurosis. Therapy had focused on bridging the gap between the patient's excessive intellectualizing and his repressed emotional life and interpreting his inordinate need