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In The Inner World of Mental Illness Mary MacLane (1902) wrote movingly of her experience as a disturbed human being.
I am not good. I am not virtuous. I am not sympathetic. I am not generous. I am merely and above all a creature of intense passionate feeling. I feel everything. It is my genius. It burns me like fire.… It is my little old life tragedy. It means everything to me. It will amuse you. It will arouse your interest. It will stir your curiosity. Some sorts of persons will find it ridiculous. But am I to suppose that it will also awaken compassion in cool, indifferent hearts? And shall my bitter litde story fall easily and comfortably upon disturbed ears, and linger for an hour, and be forgotten? Will the wise wide world itself give me in my outstretched hand a stone? (p. 280)
Mary MacLane is a woman in search of compassion but expecting indifference. Many of our patients have similar expectations and suffer their disappointment with what is generally considered a negative therapeutic reaction. Indifference kills. Even hate can be handled more easily than indifference. This article will explore stalemates in therapy resulting from the unconscious interplay of transference-countertransference reactions of therapist and patient.
The patient-therapist relationship can be viewed as a practicing experience for the patient, a time when feelings of love and hate are made conscious before the ghosts of the past can be laid to rest. We know that a patient's earliest forms of object relationships reappear in the consulting room. When they do, therapist and patient often are caught in a web, and movement depends in part upon the therapist's ability to become conscious of and tolerate his or her intense loving and hateful feelings.
Stone (1954) writes about the therapist's ability to endure treatment: