Rossi (1992) demonstrates his approach to mind-body healing while working with a volunteer, Jennifer, who has rheumatoid arthristis in her hands, which have become distorted and painful. Rossi explains that mind-body healing follows a predictable pattern. During the final phase of this approach, Jennifer begins to experience automatic movement in her hands. She exclaims that her hands are moving more freely than they have in the last five years. Rossi attributes the success to "a genuine moment of self-empowerment."
Epicurus, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche are forefathers of contemporary psychotherapy. Freud was aware of these wellsprings of modern therapy, and Jung brings them specifically into his writing and his methods. We not only get hints from these forefathers, but we also find a lasting base in them, such as Bubar's "l-thou" construct or Kierkegaard's emphasis on the ultimate relationship of the self to life. These ideas are assumed in Freud, Jung, Adler, Rank, Fromm and other leading therapists in our day. It is these latter therapists who have given us the web of ideas which underlie contemporary psychotherapy.
Human experience and human action center in and derive from human subjectivity. Our preoccupation with objectivity results displaces identity from inner living to external. Life-changing psychotherapy requires centered awareness and self-direction. Three therapeutic elements are prime: Full presence, major commitment, and exploring client's self-and-world constructs.
The importance of therapeutic alliance is described. Therapeutic alliance, transference, and transference acting-out are defined and distinguished from each other and the therapeutic task of helping the patient to convert transference acting-out to therapeutic alliance and transference is outlined. The differences in the form and content of the intrapsychic structure are described to show why different therapeutic techniques are necessary to establish the therapeutic alliance: Confrontation with the borderline and mirroring interpretation of narcissistic vulnerability with the Narcissistic Personality Disorder. A brief case illustrates each.
The emphasis in Dynamic Psychotherapy over the past few decades has shifted from a focus on insight and the recovery of early memories to a recognition that the quality of the patient-therapist relationship is the quintessential factor upon which the success of therapy depends. This involves both the real relationship and transference-countertransference elements, all within a systems-theory orientation.
The enormous changes brought about in the last 25 years by the women's movement and the sex role revolution have opened new possibilities and problems-sources of conflict and new strengths for women, men and families. There is a challenge now for psychotherapists to break through their own remnant stereotypes of feminine mystique, masculine mystique, and obsolete assumptions about family so that they may distinguish between personal and political pathology and help evolving women, men and families find and use more consciously their new strengths and confront real problems realistically.