Close Encounters: A Relational View of the Therapeutic Process

The traditional view of the therapeutic interaction fails to capture the heart of the process when it pictures the therapist as disinterested and distanced agent of change. Growing interest in the helpful use of countertransference reflects a shift toward a two-person view of treatment. There has been surprisingly little effort, however, to explore systematically the full potential of such a model for making sense of the therapeutic process. Emphasis on the relational aspect of treatment has too often been derisively equated with the idea that cure occurs through a sophisticated form of parental caring with the role of interpretation being essentially incidental. The fear of being discredited in this way has kept therapists from trying to conceptualize the ways in which a two-person process in fact underlies the patient's and therapist's search for meaning.

Contrasts a One-person and a Two-person Analysis of an Initial Interview

In Close Encounters, Dr. Robert Winer takes on this quest. He begins by dramatizing the differences through contrasting a one-person and a two-person analysis of an initial interview. Having demonstrated the problem he then reviews the ways in which both American and British authors have introduced relational considerations and shows how the intrapsychic and interpersonal views of man complement each other. Throughout the book, Dr. Winer illustrates his reasoning with clinical accounts in which he offers a frank and vivid description of his own participation.

Marriage Can be Usefully Taken as a Metaphor for Therapy

Dr. Winer explores the two-person view from a variety of vantage points. He suggests that the implicit model of therapy as a parent-child endeavor can be usefully revised by taking marriage as the metaphor. From another perspective, he suggests that the contemporary interest in narratives makes more sense when the storytelling is conceptualized as a two-person endeavor. Freud's account of his treatment of the Wolf Man is offered as a cautionary tale to illustr

Robert Winer, M.D. is Chair of the Washington School of Psychiatry's Psychoanalytic Object Relations Couple and Family Therapy Training Program and also Chair of the Washington Psychoanalytic Foundation's Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program. His is in private practice in psychoanalysis and couple and family therapy.
Dr. Winer trained at the Yale School of Medicine and the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, where he is a Teaching Analyst. He co-founded Wellmet Halfway House, a pioneer psychiatric residential facility. As a Clinical Associate at the Section on Personality Development of the National Institute of Mental Health's Adult Psychiatry Branch, he worked intensively with borderline adolescents and their families.
Dr. Winer has written and presented extensively in the area of family therapy and in applications of psychoanalysis to the humanities and social sciences.