A THERAPEUTIC ALLIANCE

A Therapeutic Alliance

A Therapeutic Alliance

Therapeutic Process

The therapeutic relationship provides the opportunity for the client to find his or her identity, multiplicity, and intentionality in the mind of the therapist as part of a continuous intersubjective process. This collaborative process is used to conceptualize the developmental antecedents and interpersonal features of the client's difficulties in living, particularly his or her strategies for managing closeness and distance in intimate relationships, and the influence that these factors have on the formation of the therapeutic alliance. An aspect of this process is the identification of distinct patterns in the complex dynamic interplay between the client's early interpersonal matrix and his or her current relationships, including that with the therapist. This facilitates an exploration of the way in which archaic relational configurations are being perpetuated in the here and now, in everyday life and in the transference-counter transference matrix, particularly at times of intense interpersonal stress(Aragón, 1995).

The client's symptoms and destructive and self-destructive behaviours are understood as expressing unresolved traumatic experience encoded and stored in implicit-procedural memory in the form of non conscious state-dependent memories, expectancies or fantasies. These organize the client's subjective experience and emerge in the relational system or intersubjective field, being communicated directly to the therapist via the client's narrative style and expressive behaviour. This, in turn, activates matching counter transferential roles and responses in the therapist which enables him or her to participate in the vicissitudes of the client's subjective experience moment-by-moment(Horvath, Luborsky, 1993). Teyber (1999), in his work Interpersonal Process in Psychotherapy: A Relational Approach, "Irvin Yalom, in his work The theory and practice of group psychotherapy, focuses on the many ways psychotherapists can and have used group therapy to help patients recover from various mental disorders, addiction, phobias and grief to name a few. Yalom places group therapy under a microscope to discern the many different ways patients and other family members can benefit from group therapy, which differs from individual therapy where the client and practitioner work individually or one-on-one to treat the patient's problem(Teyber, 2000).

Crucial aspects leading to therapeutic change include the repair of inevitable ruptures to the therapeutic relationship, the interactive regulation of heightened affective moments, the provision of new perspectives, the reorganization of maladaptive patterns of expectancies or fantasies, the transformation of implicitly encoded representations, and the promotion of reflective functioning. An emotionally meaningful therapeutic relationship facilitates a collaborative co-construction of the client's dissociated traumatic experience and promotes recognition of the mental states that motivate human behaviour in various relational contexts. This, together with the client's growing realization that he or she can contingently influence the therapist and, by extension, others in everyday life, engenders a secure sense of self and recognition of other people as separate, differentiated subjects who can be related to in non coercive ways(Horvath, Symonds, 1991).

Therapeutic alliance

The therapeutic alliance is a more encompassing term for therapy that emphasizes the collaborative nature of the partnership between counselor and client. This partnership incorporates client preferences and goals into treatment and outlines methods for accomplishing those ...