Optimal Responsiveness: How Therapists Heal Their Patients

Optimal Responsiveness: How Therapists Heal Their Patients by Bacal, Howard A.. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780765701145.

A new generation of dynamic therapists is taking a fresh look at what actually heals the patient. In contrast to the classical vision, whose essential feature is intervention by interpretation in an ambience of optimal frustration, Bacals conception of optimal responsiveness legitimizes a whole repertoire of professional behaviors-empathic attunement, confrontation, support, self-disclosure, validation or invalidation. Everything the therapist does or does not do, does or does not say, is experienced by the patient as some kind of response. Because the relational dynamic is unique to each therapist-patient dyad, the therapists responses can be tailored to meet the patients needs, enhancing specificity. And because optimal responsiveness implies recognition of the therapeutic process as a reciprocal system, it also implies reconstrual of what we know as countertransference.