Mr. Trump: How I learned to stop worrying and love the patient-aggressor.
This paper offers an integration of social issues, psychoanalytic theory, and analytic experience in the treatment of a patient whose political values and identifications differed significantly from my own. Our political leanings facilitated a dynamic tension of difference, power, and aggression that mirrored how each of us felt in relation to the current social-political milieu. In particular, the sadomasochistic dynamics on display in the treatment offered me a unique way of understanding my relationship with my patient and opened new ways of understanding the political present. In the end, I learned to stop worrying about getting rid of anger, aggression, and splitting, and instead to embrace what these feelings and behaviors can tell me as a therapist, and what they can inform for my patients about the nature of relationality, identity, and difference.
['Coren|Sidney|S|']
D000328:Adult D000374:Aggression D003379:Countertransference D005260:Female D006801:Humans D008149:Love D008297:Male D011057:Politics D011369:Professional-Patient Relations D011613:Psychotherapy
countertransference politics and psychotherapy projective identification psychotherapy technique social issues and psychotherapy