What the Therapist Thinks About You
What Your Therapist Thinks of You: A Letter to the Editor
As social media creeps into more and more previously private parts of our lives, it is understandable that even clinicians in the mental health field would be tempted to join in.
In “What the Therapist Thinks About You” (July 7, 2014) Jan Hoffman presents examples of taking the process of treatment out of the office and into the domain of the internet, including posting session notes and diagnoses. He refers to one study showing that patients reading their therapist’s comments “became more involved in their care.”
Considering that mental health patients fall within the very wide continuum from psychotic to neurotic illness, it is difficult to evaluate such experiments with a general conclusion.
The office is the sanctuary where the patient is free to reveal everything. Today’s technological wonders bring the understandable temptation of instantaneous gratification through communication outside of the office. But the slow and deliberate analytic process is jeopardized when the client moves from the session to an untutored reading of the therapist’s notes or diagnosis.
Posting the notes amounts to an analytic intervention and, like all interventions, should be aimed at moving the process of treatment to new and/or deeper places. If a sharing of communication outside the office is intended to resolve a resistance I am all for it, but it concerns me that in the sped up world too many are moving too fast.
Theodore Laquercia, PhD
NY State Licensed Psychoanalyst
President
Society of Modern Psychoanalysts
Emeritus of Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalytic Voices 