Chance Encounters: Unintentional Therapist Disclosure

Chance encounters are often filled with dread for the therapist because aspects of the therapist's subjectivity are frequently revealed unintentionally. The absence of the therapy hour parameters temporarily heightens the analyst's anxiety about his or her own wishes for and fears of intimacy, the need to be perceived as and to be normal, and the conflict between wishes for recognition from the other and wishes for autonomy and independence. As a result, the chance encounter taxes the therapist's illusion that he or she is able to choose a response based mainly on the patient's needs. The therapist's comfort with and defensive use of subject or object roles is brought into focus and becomes a source of information about the current transference–countertransference matrix. In such a spontaneous meeting, the analyst has little time to debate the consequences of self-disclosure or the value of old versus new object experience for the patient. Forced mutuality or asymmetrical reverse is more often than not the product of such an encounter. In the extratherapeutic contact, the patient has the opportunity to experience the therapist as a separate person or as an extension of the self, as an object available for idealization or devaluation, or as subject in his or her own right. Case material is presented to highlight the challenges created by unintentional disclosure, particularly with an eye toward exploring the therapist's anxiety about such experiences.