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.
Self psychology and the concept of empathic inquiry—of staying connected with a patient's experience—have changed the way I hear clinical material. But sometimes—when, for example, a patient needs to complain, and have an adversarial selfobject response—what I think is empathic turns out to be unempathic (Wolf, 1988). This type of patient feels misunderstood and complains. Yet when I try harder to be understanding, the patient becomes anxious. If, however, I lose patience, the patient suddenly feels better. Being empathic, I come to realize, is letting the patient complain and fight. Over time, I have leamed intuitively when to try harder to be understanding and when to just be patient and survive the patient's complaints.
Teaching students, however, has been more difficult. Students want to know how to judge when to try harder and when to stay patiently in what I like to call a survival mode. Some ideas from outside of self psychology have helped me in teaching students how to make this assessment.
Ten years ago, colleagues in San Francisco introduced me to the ideas and empirical research of Weiss and Sampson and their control mastery theory (Weiss, Sampson, and the Mount Zion Psychotherapy Research Group, 1986). Since that time—in a mutual collaboration—I have taught my colleagues about self psychology while immersing myself