Child And Adolescent Treatment For Social Work Practice by Theresa Aiello

Author:Theresa Aiello
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Free Press
Published: 1999-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

IDEALIZATION IN THE TRANSFERENCE IN THE MIDDLE PHASE OF TREATMENT

Case Example

Janie, a nine-year-old, described consistent unfairness in her family. Her father openly favored his son over Janie. He was also quite demeaning of his wife, Janie’s mother, who did little to defend herself and, in fact, often agreed with her husband’s disparaging remarks of her character. Janie said she felt that in her family there were two teams, “the boys and the girls,” and that “the girls always lost.”

Janie idealized her therapist, however, always seeing her in the most flattering light. One day she admired the therapist’s clothes, commenting, “You’re all in velvet and suede today.” Janie wrote a story about the therapist and herself. She described their adventures and close friendship. In the story, boys pursued them but Janie and her therapist disdainfully eschewed contact with them, telling them, “Go away, you stupid, idiotic idiots.” In her idealization of the therapist, Janie felt attached and somewhat merged with an admirable and powerful female figure: the two of them escape and disdain the men.

Curiously, Janie’s father and mother also idealized the therapist, seeing her as “a sophisticated woman of the world who could throw away the textbooks.” (The therapist herself felt irritated by the parents’ excessive and fawning flattery and angered by their emotional abuse of their child.) Both husband and wife described having narcissistic parents who were often neglectful of them and who required a great deal of flattering from them.

Both Janie and her parents were organizing themselves in treatment around the perceived needs of the therapist as authority figure: their idealization of the therapist served to make them feel more valuable in turn.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.