Читать книгу Making Sense Together - Peter Buirski - Страница 17

Here are some important prescriptions for the unsettling attitude we advocate for therapists: Do not give in to your need to act helpfully. Remain flexible, fallible, and uncertain. Know that however you try to avoid influencing your patients, you inevitably influence and are influenced by them. Apart from ethical standards, there are no hard-and-fast rules to guide your work. Sometimes even the unquestioned and most universal practices have potentially detrimental consequences for treatment and ought to be handled with great sensitivity to their meanings for the patient. Finally, the patient’s symptoms and behaviors, no matter how self-defeating or incomprehensible to the observer, represent his striving for health and psychological stability.

The basic orienting perspective for those practicing intersubjectively is on making sense of the patient’s subjectivity within a particular context, as it is influenced by the person of the therapist. In subsequent chapters, we address specific ways to enhance the therapist’s capacity to understand the patient’s subjectivity and how to respond once the patient’s perspective is grasped.