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Books & Published Articles
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"Hidden Faults: Recognizing
and Resolving Therapeutic Disjunctions"
A Book for
Psychotherapists
-- Theoretically Innovative
-- Inherently
Practical
Hidden Faults explores ways to resolve stalemate and
further progress in psychotherapy. |
Disjunctions: the spectrum of breaches in
therapy, from subtle to devastating, when therapist and patient miss and
confound each other. Disjunctions may briefly confuse the therapeutic partners,
or even grind the therapy to a halt. Always, they provide unique opportunities
for therapist and patient to understand each other and bring their work to ever
more profound levels!
Hidden Faults explores therapeutic
disjunctions and their place in resolving stalemate and furthering progress in
psychotherapy. Disjunction is a concept that can be used with any psychodynamic
system supporting a two-person view of therapy, where the inner life of both
participants is open for inquiry and change. Little of significance will happen
in therapy if the therapist is not willing to be fundamentally influenced by
the patient, since transformation in the therapist is the most powerful sign to
the patient of being taken seriously. Steven Frankel illustrates this central
point using extensive case material showing therapist and patient in their
human, often agonizing struggles to bring about creative change.
The
author calls his picture of the mind, "the self, and other unit model." The
major activities in working within this structure are recognizing the multiple
relational configurations each partner brings to the therapy field, and
identifying and resolving the inevitable disjunctions that interfere with
therapeutic movement. In contrast to traditional models where the patient's
wisdom may be minimized, Dr. Frankel holds that heartfelt initiation from each
partner in recognizing and healing failures in rapport leads to developmental
momentum and lasting creative change.
What Reviewers Say about
Hidden Faults...
"Hidden Faults is a brave and wise
book. Steven Frankel sets before the reader every clinician’s dread and
every clinician’s experience – times when disjunctions between
analyst’s and patient’s experiences and expectations threaten to
undermine or end the therapy – and he carefully elaborates his theories
about how such disjunctions can be addressed. Frankel’s absolute honesty
about his own mistakes and misunderstandings, along with the extended and rich
case examples he weaves throughout the book, make a compelling and persuasive
read."
- Nancy D. Chodorow, Ph.D.
"The timeliness,
originality, and importance of Hidden Faults lie in Steven
Frankel’s highly readable integration of the personal and interpersonal,
the individual and the interpersonal field, the unitary self and multiple self
states. Any reader who adopts and explores Frankel’s central concept, the
self and other unit (SO), will be convinced that mind and relatedness must
never again be considered separately. And yet from cover to cover Frankel
maintains a thoroughly clinical focus. He makes the case that the crucial parts
of treatment are one particular kind of problematic SO, the therapeutic
disjunction. Frankel’s honest, appealing, and straightforward discussion
of his own clinical experiences will be of enormous assistance to his readers
in recognizing and resolving these therapeutic snags."
- Donnel Stern,
Ph.D.
"Dr. Frankel has written a book of enormous usefulness to
psychotherapists. He delves into the inevitable lapses in the therapist’s
understanding of the patient, opening himself to the learning that emerges from
an acceptance of not knowing. The compelling case examples show that the good
therapist heals, not by having the answers, but by being willing to be
profoundly affected and changed in the relationship with the patient. This book
can transform the therapist’s (and hence the patient’s) experience of
the therapeutic process, giving it new depth and vitality. Its message
resonates long after one has finished reading it."
- Alicia F.
Lieberman, Ph.D.
"In Hidden Faults, Dr. Steven
Frankel writes candidly, respectfully and insightfully about his experience
that a psychotherapeutic process is first and foremost a human event involving
a complex, often frightening, often passionate relationship between two people.
The therapist is half of the therapeutic relationship and must be emotionally
capable of taking responsibility for his or her half of it. When the therapist
becomes aware of a fissure between the patient’s and his own understanding
of and response to what it is that is happening between them (at a conscious
and unconscious level) he or she must have the courage to put it plainly on the
table for jointly reflective consideration. In Frankel’s discussion of the
ways in which the relationship between therapist and patient inevitably
collapses into various sorts of mutual alienation, he convincingly demonstrates
that such "disjunctions" become opportunities for therapeutic repair or, when
left unrecognized for long periods of time, usually result in the end of the
possibility of psychological change on the part of either the patient or the
analyst. Too often, the latter outcome has been viewed as evidence of the
patient’s ‘unanalyzability.’
There is a freshness and
aliveness to this book. No ‘psychotherapeutic rule’ is assumed to
hold validity until Frankel comes to believe over time that it has demonstrated
its value in his own clinical work (regardless of who its original author was
or how long it has been around). Such openness to new possibilities is a rare
event in the history of psychoanalysis and spending time with Dr. Frankel has
he describes this work is a great pleasure.’
- Thomas H. Ogden,
M.D.
HIDDEN FAULTS
Table of Contents
- Fault Lines: An Introduction to Therapeutic
Disjunctions
- Fractures: The Nature of Disjunctions
- Through a Microscope: Recognizing Disjunctions
- Tracing the Cracks: Arriving at a Consensus
- Mending: Working with Disjunctions
- Pulling Together Under Stress: Relational Consequences
of Working with Disjunctions
- Irreparable Damage: Patients Trapped by
Disjunctions
- Detailed Mapping: Using the SO Model in Working with
Disjunctions
- Altering the Landscape: Using Disjunctions to Create
Change
 
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