Dialogue With Psychosis: Induced Psychotic Countertransference in Psychotherapy With Psychotically Disturbed Patients

Abstract

The therapeutic encounter with psychotic patients presents therapists with moments in which they may regress, together with the patient, toward primitive and psychotic areas of experience. Within this shared psychotic world, therapists might feel persecuted, as if the ground is slipping from beneath their feet. The author suggests that the psychotic part of the personality, as argued by Bion, is inherent to all of us and may come alive in the psyche of the therapist in response to patients in psychotic states. The psychotic dialogue that emerges between patient and therapist, which involves projective identification and counter-transference mechanisms, must be worked through. Therapists’ capacity to survive the psychosis forced upon them and to move through and beyond it is highly significant. By examining clinical material from therapy with a patient diagnosed with schizophrenia, the author discusses this unique countertransference phenomenon, which he terms induced psychotic countertransference.