The Analyst’s Experience of Trust and Mistrust

Abstract

While the patient’s trust in the analyst is a much-examined subject, the analyst’s trust in the patient has been underexplored. Within a relational model that views affective vulnerability and risk by the analyst as inevitable and crucial to therapeutic action, the analyst’s ability to trust the patient is critical and inextricably linked to the patient’s sense of trusting the analyst. I describe and illustrate, through clinical vignettes, different aspects of trust that can impact the analytic process. Trust can be viewed as a prerequisite for analysis, as an analytic achievement, or both. The analyst may face the paradoxical challenge of attempting to work therapeutically with issues of trust when he or she does not feel trusting enough to do so.

Notes

¹ By self-revelation, I refer to any action or verbalization that reveals anything of the analyst’s person. This could, but does not have to, include direct verbal self-disclosure.

² Some (e.g., Aron, 1991; Jacobs, 1986; Singer, 1977) have argued that everything the analyst does or does not do reveals something about him or her.

³ Davies does not write about trust, per se. While safety and trust are not synonymous, I view analytic safety as one kind of trust, a felt sense that one is safe from physical or emotional destabilization or harm in relation to another person. Frank (2004) defined the analyst’s trust as “the analyst’s experience of safety and feelings of comfort” (p. 373). He focused on conscious experience, whereas Davies discussed unconscious safety. Both differ from a more thought-based belief in another person’s dependability, such as the kind of trust described by Bach (2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Danielle Novack

Danielle Novack, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and a candidate at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is Clinical Supervisor at the New School Psychotherapy Research Program and is in private practice in New York City.