Ghosts in the Consulting Room: A Discussion of Anson's “Ghosts in the Dressing Room”

Abstract

This paper discusses Andrew Anson's “Ghosts in the Dressing Room,” providing an opportunity to discuss therapist self-disclosure and responses it may provoke in psychodynamic psychotherapy. Freud discouraged self-disclosure, his “blank screen” model based on a belief that the best way for therapists to understand libidinal transferences was to reveal nothing directly to patients. Freud's close follower Sándor Ferenczi eventually became critical of analytic opacity, arguing therapist self-disclosure was often necessary and healing for traumatized patients. Although Freud's libido theory is no longer considered relevant to psychotherapy training, his blank screen model still persists. However, there is little empirical evidence supporting nondisclosure as a superior therapeutic technique compared to self-disclosure. Nevertheless, since Freud and Ferenczi's time, self-disclosure has been controversial due to unexamined beliefs, ideology, and allegiances to particular analytic schools of thought. The dilemma created for openly gay therapists is that coming out, a form of self-disclosure, is perhaps the most commonly shared cultural experience defining a modern gay identity. Yet a blank-screen model that strongly discourages overt admissions about analysts’ subjectivities, let alone their sexual identities, regards openly gay therapists as engaging in undesirable countertransferential enactments. The paper concludes with a more detailed discussion of Anson's clinical material.

KEYWORDS:

• boundaries
• coming out
• the closet
• countertransference
• Ferenczi
• Freud
• gay therapists
• psychotherapy
• self- disclosure
• psychoanalysis

Notes

1. As Lipton (1977) famously noted, there was a marked disjunction between the way Freud actually practiced and the techniques he expected of his followers.

2. While this is a possible interpretation of non-disclosure, these are not “hiding's” only meanings. Nor does coming out prevent other enactments of secrecy and shame in the transference and countertransference.