You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Opening up to memories of abuse is a very disorienting experience for a patient. It completely unhinges the patient from the story of his or her life, and disrupts not only the patient's relationship patterns, but the existing construction of the self. Similarly, the analyst's view of this patient can be unhinged if the abuse was not suspected by the analyst. Even the analyst's own world view can be disrupted on hearing the horrors in these patients' stories.
Countertransference can be the determining factor in what the analyst sees and hears in the analytic session. The analyst's world view contains assumptions about what exists and what is only fabrication. This view directs the analyst's readiness to believe and disbelieve specific material, and constitutes a predisposition or countertransference resistance. Both believing or not believing the patient's story are points on the continuum of tension between the analyst's and patient's needs. Leaping from one point to another on the continuum does not end the difficulty of dealing with countertransference resistances, it just changes the mix of its contents and intensities.
This is especially true in cases of sexual abuse, its overlapping category of ritual abuse, and the related phenomena of multiple personality disorders (MPD). The content of sexual or ritual abuse memories can be so intense as to almost ensure counter-transference problems. The difficulty of recognizing patients presenting