What is it about?
Often clinicians are impacted emotionally with greater intensity than they are anticipating. Such experiences tend to disorganize our thinking because we lose our footing conceptually and interpersonally. Attention to the embodied experiences of ourselves as well as our patients gives us a strategy to re-gain a sense of reflection and re-enter a process of meaning making with our patients that feels authentic to the emotionally turbulent experience of both patient and clinician. Thinking in terms of emotional fluidity in addition to structures of experience assists this process of re-connection.
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Why is it important?
These strategies are important because they are often nodal points in a developing therapeutic relationship that can either collapse possibility for growth and movement or open up a sense of hope and commitment in both patient and clinician.
Perspectives
The kinds of strategy described and explained theoretically in this paper have helped me to work effectively with patients I might otherwise not be able to help. Additionally, the use of these strategies over many years has increased my confidence to manage the most vulnerable moments, where both collapse and breakthrough are equally possible in treatment both for me and my patients.
Steven Knoblauch
New York University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Fluidity of Emotions and Clinical Vulnerability: A Field of Rhythmic Tensions, Psychoanalytic Perspectives, August 2017, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/1551806x.2017.1342421.
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