Empathy in Counseling and Psychotherapy by Arthur J. Clark

Author:Arthur J. Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-317-71680-8
Publisher: Routledge

Interpretation in the Treatment Process

As discussed in the previous chapter, interpretation is the most prominent therapeutic intervention in psychoanalytic therapy (Clark, 1995a; Garduk & Haggard, 1972; Ornstein & Ornstein, 1980). In contrast, however, to the classical approach, which emphasizes the resolution of internal conflict, self psychology focuses on working through deficits in the self structure. In this respect, rather than attempting to explain conflictual relationships from a conflict model perspective, self psychology utilizes interpretations to explain deficits in a patient’s developmental experiences (Ornstein & Ornstein, 1980). After a period of data gathering by means of a process that employs empathy as a scientific tool, the second phase of self psychology treatment focuses on explaining the meaning of a patient’s experience through the use of interpretations (Rowe & MacIsaac, 1989). Over the course of treatment, an empathic understanding of the patient prepares the way for interpretations that ultimately broaden and deepen the empathic grasp of the individual (Kahn, 1985; Patton & Meara, 1992).

Although Kohut (1971) recognized the role of interpretations in advancing a therapist’s empathic understanding of patients to a more mature level, he also believed that the conceptual formulations of the intervention should not involve empathy. Instead, Kohut felt that a practitioner must relinquish an empathic attitude in order to be able to assume the more objective and detached stance needed to evaluate the meaning of empathically derived data. Furthermore, Kohut (1991) asserted that treatment cure involves the employment of interpretations and not the therapist’s empathic understanding of a patient. In discussing a statement that he made in How Does Analysis Cure? (1984), Kohut (1991) wrote:

I submit that the most important point that I made was that analysis cures by giving explanations—interventions on the level of interpretation; not by ‘understanding,’ not by repeating and confirming what the patient feels and says, that’s only the first step; but then [the analyst has] to move on and give an interpretation. (p. 532)

Through this assertion, Kohut disassociates his work from a type of corrective emotional experience (Alexander & French, 1946), while linking self psychology with a well-established intervention in psychoanalytic therapy (Rothstein, 1980). Kohut’s position is also theoretically opposed to that of client-centered therapy, which recognized the therapeutic contribution of empathic understanding for effecting client personality change (Rogers, 1957, 1959).

It was also Kohut’s belief that the extent of a therapist’s theoretical knowledge of psychological dynamics is directly related to the accuracy of employed interpretations. In turn, more accurate or deeply accurate interpretations provide “proof” to the patient that the practitioner empathically understands his or her experiencing from a broader perspective. In Kohut’s view, self psychology offers the most conceptually sound principles on which to understand a patient’s developmental history and current functioning. By drawing from self psychology conceptions in the understanding phase of treatment, it becomes possible to formulate interpretations in the explanation period of therapy (Kohut, 1977). Kohut felt that as therapy progresses from the understanding phase of treatment to the explanation phase, the qualitative aspects of empathy also change. In this

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