Betrayal

I HAVE SAT IN MY CONSULTING ROOM and experienced the awful feeling of knowing that I have failed my patient in some important way. It has a palpable feel to it: a sinking feeling of having been the one to disappoint, to let down, to betray the trust of another. And yet, I haven’t found the term “betrayal” nor any reasonable facsimile depicted in the literature; when mentioned at all, betrayal is usually depicted as residing somehow within the patient, or within the patient’s experience. From this protective distance, we can hazard our conjectures, postulate reenactments, feel compassion for the betrayed. When I went searching for writings on betrayals within the therapeutic relationship—between patient and analyst—at first I could find nothing. I was perplexed, dismayed, and finally annoyed at our arrogance in not seeing what, to me, is an issue inherent in the process. But then I began to wonder; perhaps I was using the wrong term. I went up to the stacks and pulled down recent volumes of analytic journals, searching for some title approaching this issue. Finally I found it, and realized that I had been taking the wrong tack entirely. Apparently, what had seemed to me to be the patient’s subjective feeling of betrayal was to be explored, instead, from the analyst’s perspective, in terms of “error.” It wasn’t betrayal that I would find explored here, but “mistakes, errors, and oversights” (Levenson, 1992). And so, this omission was to become the foundation for my musings over what, for me, has the discomforting feel of betrayal.

In searching through the references to the article I had found, the threads pulled inevitably back toward issues of countertransference. Countertransference may be, in some ultimate sense, the point; but it is so large a one that it obscures what, to me, is more truly the point, which I find better described by the poet Adrienne Rich (1979) than by Levenson, as “lies, secrets, and silence.” This was more the purpose of