A guide to assessment for psychoanalytic psychotherapists

71 Pages·2011·0.246 MB·English

by  Cooper, Judy, Alfillé, Helen

CHAPTERTITLE I
A GUIDE TO ASSESSMENT
FOR PSYCHOANALYTIC
PSYCHOTHERAPISTS

A GUIDE TO
ASSESSMENT FOR
PSYCHOANALYTIC
PSYCHOTHERAPISTS
Judy Cooper
and
Helen Alfillé
First published in 2011 by
Karnac Books Ltd
118 Finchley Road, London NW3 5HT
Copyright © 2011 to Judy Cooper and Helen Alfillé
The rights of Judy Cooper and Helen Alfillé to be identified as the authors
of this work have been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the
Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the
prior written permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 85575 552 9
Edited, designed and produced by The Studio Publishing Services Ltd
www.publishingservicesuk.co.uk
e-mail: [email protected]
Printed in Great Britain
www.karnacbooks.com
CONTENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHORS vii
FOREWORD ix
Stanley Ruszczynski
PREFACE xi
Julian Lousada
CHAPTER ONE
Overview of assessment 1
CHAPTER TWO
Are we looking for a diagnosis? 9
CHAPTER THREE
The consultation 17
CHAPTER FOUR
Transference and countertransference in 25
the assessment consultation
v
vi CONTENTS
CHAPTER FIVE
Contraindications 33
CHAPTER SIX
People who come to us for assessment 41
AFTERWORD 47
REFERENCES 49
INDEX 53
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Helen Alfillé is a Senior Member of the British Association of
Psychotherapists, a Full Member and Training Analyst of the British
Psychoanalytic Association, and a Member of the International
Psychoanalytic Association. She is in private practice in London.
She is the co-editor of Assessment in Psychotherapy(London: Karnac,
1998), and of Dilemmas in the Consulting Room (London: Karnac,
2002).
Judy Cooper is a Senior Member of the BritishAssociation of
Psychotherapists, a Full Member of the British Psychoanalytic
Association, and a Member of the International Psychoanalytic
Association. She is in private practice in London. She is the author
of Speak of Me as I Am: The Life and Work of Masud Khan (London:
Karnac, 1993), and co-editor of: Narcissistic Wounds: Clinical Perspec-
tives (London: Whurr, 1995); Assessment in Psychotherapy (London:
Karnac, 1998); Dilemmas in the Consulting Room (London: Karnac,
2002).
vii

FOREWORD
Stanley Ruszczynski
The assessment procedure is a highly charged emotional situation.
The patient is in psychological pain and distress and has taken the
brave, sometimes desperate, step of seeking help with that emo-
tional state. The patient’s sensitivity to his pain and disturbance is
likely to be raw, and his presentation of himself is likely to be full
of ambivalence. The assessor offers himself as someone who might
be able to discern the nature of the patient’s distress so as to make
a judgement about whether something he knows about, the psy-
choanalytic process, might offer some assistance. The assessor has
the responsibility of meeting the patient’s emotional state and sen-
sitively using that experience to carry out the assessment task. To
do so, the authors write that “... the assessor needs to provide a
safe setting in which a patient can express himself as freely as he is
able ...”, and, in so doing, often unconsciously recreating aspects
of the difficulties which have led to the request for an assessment.
This short book provides a treasure trove of clinical vignettes
and conceptual ideas, from a variety of theoretical frameworks and
writers, and aims to inform and assist the assessor in the hugely
important task of making a judgement about the nature of the
patient’s distress and the suitability of psychoanalytic treatment.
ix