Philosophically-informed psychotherapy and the concept of transference.

Abstract

The theoretical and philosophical assumptions underlying our psychological practices greatly affect the ways that clinicians in the mental health field go about their work and to some extent how successful at it they are. This paper attempts to illustrate this by describing how a careful and systematic look at the underlying philosophical presuppositions surrounding the concept of transference yielded clear clinical benefits to my own practice of psychotherapy. More specifically, by contrasting the philosophical paradigm implied in the classical definitions of transference with that of an alternative, phenomenologically-based model my understandings of the clinical phenomena in question were allowed to develop in new ways -ones which feel truer to the actual experiences in question and ultimately more helpful.