Talking about Medication

Abstract

With the increasing use of psychotropic medication concomitant with psychoanalysis, attention must be given to the challenges created by complaints of medication side effects. When confronted with these side effects, analysts may experience specific, uniquely actualized countertransference anxieties that can prompt the abandonment of transference analysis. Particular countertransference fantasies that arise in combined treatments are examined, as are the reasons for the analyst's suspension of curiosity and openness and its clinical consequences. In these situations, effective analysis requires the analyst to be “bilingual,” to hold in mind both the analytic and the pharmacological model.