Rethinking Self-Disclosure: An Example of the Clinical Utility of the Analyst's Self-Disclosing Activities

As we are all well aware, the vision of the absolute rule for the psychoanalyst to withhold from a patient his or her personal opinions, feelings, and therapeutic ambitions has changed greatly of late. Moved by the profound incongruity of living a shared experience with another from afar in order to achieve healing for a patient within that relationship, many psychoanalysts now speak and write very differently. Replacing these older analytic cornerstones are newer ideas and concepts such as enactments (Chused, 1991; McLaughlin, 1994), social constructivism (Hoffman, 1983), interpersonal dynamics (Mitchell, 1993), and irreducible subjectivity (Renik, 1993). Although many crucial distinctions and delineations exist among these points of view, they share the common conviction of healing occurring within a mutually lived and experienced relationship, and with some degree of mutual expression of powerful feelings. Remaining to be worked out are the inordinately complex issues involving the ways in which the analyst's personal experiences, revelations, and self-disclosures are shared with his or her patient. A need exists to document, describe, and study the vicissitudes of the role of the moment-to-moment descriptions of the analyst's self-disclosures in the analytic treatment. In this paper I will describe my thinking about the topic with a patient, Mrs. A I hope to demonstrate the process of how I worked initially with Mrs. A in relatively traditional ways, but with supportive