Self-Revelation and Disclosure: A Cautionary Note

Disagreements about self-disclosure relate directly to differing conceptualizations of what it is that brings patients to treatment, what underlies their difficulties, what is the proper role of the therapist, and what it is about the treatment that is helpful. The classical analytic view posits that current relationships are always affected by libidinal and aggressive wishes and the defenses against them, organized as fantasies, and originating in the patient's childhood. Experience never falls upon a tabula rasa, but is to a greater or lesser extent organized by existing drive-defense configurations. We refer to the transposition of early fantasies onto the relationship with the analyst as the transference. This does not mean that current relationships are restricted to transference feelings and are only seen through the distorting lens of compromise formations based on early experiences. But, as Martin Stein (1981) has emphasized, the realistic relationship itself can satisfy transference wishes in ways that are often not immediately apparent, and so cannot be neatly separated from the transference. Treating any aspect of the relationship with the therapist, and this includes self-disclosures by the analyst, as being primarily real, contributes to resistance against analysis of the transference, and for that matter, of the countertransference, as well.

To repeat, transference feelings often attach themselves to the current reality of the treatment situation. In the Postscript to the Dora case, Freud (1905) speaks of some transferences as being “ingeniously constructed; their content has been subjected to a moderating influence—to sublimation as I call it—and they may become