The Waiting Room as an Extension of the Treatment: Transference and Countertransference across the Consulting and Waiting Rooms

ABSTRACT

The author explores how the patient uses the waiting room and the relationship that he establishes with it vis-à-vis the analysis – an under-represented topic in the literature with the exception of a few authors. Drawing on field theory, Winnicott and Bion, the author examines how the patient’s relationship to the waiting room as an environment houses specific self-states that may be discrepant with those that emerge in the consulting room. Similarly, there may be complimentary versions of the analyst as object in relation to the patient’s discrete self-states that are specific to the waiting room in relation to the transference-countertransference dynamic. With the use of an extended vignette, the author demonstrates the importance of making use of the waiting room as an element of the treatment.

This article is referred to by:

Waiting in Rooms: Discussion of Paper by Christopher Bonovitz

Discussion: “The Waiting Room as an Extension of the Treatment: Transference and Countertransference across the Consulting and Waiting Rooms”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christopher Bonovitz

Christopher Bonovitz, Psy.D., is Training and Supervising Analyst, William Alanson White Institute; Adjunct Professor and Clinical Consultant, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; and Associate Editor, Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Contemporary Psychoanalysis.