Self-disclosure And Analytic Space—some Issues Raised By Jay Greenberg's Paper On Self-disclosure

DR. GREENBERG CITES Freud's objections to the analyst making direct self-disclosures to his patients, and these arguments concerning the possible ways in which direct self-disclosure might disadvantage the patient are indeed plausible. But Freud led the way for other analysts to continue for too many years to be either, at best, uninterested in, or, at worst, oblivious to the actual impact that they might be having on their patients. As Ferenczi (1933) pointed out, in ignoring or otherwise invalidating his patient's experience of the analyst's negative impact, the analyst may be likely to inflict on his patient an unwitting traumatic repetition of the kind of mystification that the patient grew up with in his family of origin.

Freud was more interested in forcibly overcoming his patient's resistances to accepting his idea of the truth than in any possible negative impact that his interpretative activity might have been having on them. Freud's need to be right eclipsed any awareness of the ways in which his conduct of the analytic interaction might disempower his patients to the point of keeping them stuck in their neurosis.

This was evident in Freud's treatment of Dora. He had little appreciation for the possible destructive impact of his own countertransference on Dora, blaming her willfulness for the failure of the treatment, and never understanding any of the unwitting ways in which he was repeating with her the abusive, exploitative acts of the other adults in her life.

Notwithstanding the fact that his essay "Analysis Terminable and Interminable" ranks among his major contributions, it is worth noting that the impetus for writing it rose from his need to justify himself vis-à-vis Ferenczi's complaints and grievances about the shortcomings of his analysis with Freud.

Perhaps beginning with Ferenczi, analysts of the interpersonal school increasingly have come to understand the analytic interaction to be one