Empathy and anti-empathy are very important in psychoanalytic theory. Freud believed that empathy reproduced some emotions in previous lives. If this emotion is suppressed for a long time and there is nowhere to release it, it will become a psychological entanglement-"complex"
Empathy: During the treatment, the feelings of the visitors towards an object (especially their parents) in childhood are transferred to the therapist.
Simply put, empathy is two dislocations. One is the dislocation of time, putting what happened in the past into the present; The second is to transfer the past attitude towards parents to the attitude towards the people around them.
Empathy includes two types:
The first is negative empathy: it means that visitors regard the counselor as the object that has brought him frustration, unhappiness, pain or depression in the past experience. In the counseling situation, transfer the original emotions to the counselor.
The second is positive empathy: visitors regard the counselor as an important figure in their past lives, and gradually develop strong interest and strong feelings for the counselor, showing great friendship, admiration, admiration and even admiration for the opposite sex counselor. Positive empathy helps to build relationships in the early stage of counseling.
Positive empathy can be divided into consistent positive empathy and complementary positive empathy.
Consistent positive empathy refers to the love tendency caused by the fact that visitors really like the psychological counselor's "personality charm" (admiration). We should express our understanding and gratitude to this kind of empathy psychological counselor and point out that this feeling cannot be realized, thus eliminating the illusion that the other person is in love.
Complementary positive empathy means that visitors feel insecure and want to strongly express their dependence on consultants. This kind of empathy is most likely to happen to visitors with depression. For this kind of empathy counselor, what he can do is to point out the empathy points in time, explain the attitude he doesn't like, and prevent the situation from developing further.
The general principles of empathy therapy in psychotherapy are discovery, identification, clarification, explanation and correction.
The best tool to explore another person's inner world: therapists can make full use of their feelings with visitors, which is anti-empathy.
Therapists' total emotion towards visitors: 1. What is seduced by visitors is anti-empathy; Generally speaking, it refers to a subconscious emotional experience of love, hate and hatred of the consultant to the visitor. It is a psychological counselor's response to the empathy of the visitors.
2. Unresolved inner conflict, that is, the therapist's empathy.
Anti-empathy can be divided into consistent anti-empathy and complementary anti-empathy: hurting your pain, loving your love, and grieving your sadness. Therapists will identify with the visitors themselves, sympathize with them very much, and feel that they can understand them very well.
Complementary anti-empathy: the counselor identifies himself as the parents, brothers and sisters of the visitor and feels that he has experienced the feelings of the visitor for a relative. Teacher Zeng Qifeng's induction: complementary anti-empathy means that in my relationship with the visitor, I feel the feelings of his original object and treat him inappropriately like his original object. )
Understand the visitor with anti-empathy: the visitor can't tell the therapist how uncomfortable he is, but his subconscious knows how to tell the therapist, which is to make the therapist feel the same pain as him.
Freud once pointed out that "doctors should be opaque in front of patients. Just like a mirror, it should not show the patient anything except itself. " This is to emphasize that consultants should try to remain neutral in front of visitors and not let their worldview affect the worldview of visitors. In order to do this, counselors must have a keen observation of their own anti-empathy performance.
? Take empathy and anti-communism as an example: a middle-aged man came to see me. He suffers from panic attacks. To be exact, he often has panic attacks. For example, when he is walking in the street and many people pass by him, he will feel a sense of dying, and his heart will stop or have a stroke. He is surrounded by strangers and no one cares about him. I felt a little annoyed when he kept describing his fear of death to me. Then I scolded him. I said that you presented me with the image of a coward. A man who is so afraid of death will really make others look down on you and you will look down on yourself. If you die, you die. What's the big deal? If you are afraid of your own death all day, you might as well die early and be a hero 20 years later! When I said this, a voice told me that everything you just said was wrong. But I still can't help but want to scold him. I just made a mistake. Let's repeat the four processes I just mentioned:
The middle-aged man was treated inappropriately when he was a child. How is it inappropriate? That is, his father is a soldier, and the soldier's requirement for himself is to be brave. His father couldn't see that he was not brave, so he projected it on his son and accused him every day: Why are you so timid? When you grow up, you will become a coward. You're afraid of death. It's no use living in this world. After years of suggestion, the patient has really become a person who is afraid of death and often has symptoms of panic attacks. Maybe this patient's subconscious will think that I am not such a person. I became a coward because my father needed me to be a coward to set off his bravery, so he wanted to find a psychotherapist to help him see what kind of person he really was. When he came to me, he expected me not to treat him inappropriately like his father, but his subconscious kept tempting me to think that he was a coward, treating him inappropriately like his father and reprimanding him. As I just said, under his strong temptation, I didn't insist on my promise that I would never be inappropriate to him, and then I was really scolded by him at that moment like his father, saying, you coward, you might as well die.
This case embodies two types of anti-communism, one is complementary anti-communism and the other is consistent anti-communism. In the case of patients with panic disorder, I say in a tone of lesson that you should be a brave person. If you are not a brave person, but a timid person, you might as well die and be a hero twenty years later. It's called complementary anti-empathy. What he meant was that the attitude I showed at that time was actually playing the role of his father who was a soldier accusing him, so I added it and became part of his early relationship. In this case, what would a consistent anti-empathy look like? That is, I understand his feelings as a little boy, that is, I do have cowardice as a person, but I also have courage. And this part, as a father, you should also see it. So if I am as angry with my father as he is, it is always anti-immigration. The principle of dealing with complementary and consistent anti-communism is to try to find consistent anti-communism when therapists find themselves complementary and anti-communism.
In fact, seeing a psychiatrist is such a process:
First, when I was a child, I was treated inappropriately and formed a problematic personality;
Second, I tried to change this personality, so I went to a professional to do it, hoping that he would treat me well;
Third, in my relationship with the psychiatrist, my subconscious will unconsciously induce him to treat me inappropriately like his parents or others;
Fourth, psychologists should resist the pressure of being tempted to treat this person improperly and resolutely do not treat visitors improperly.
Everyone tends to live in the past, and psychoanalysis wants people to live in the present.
Gains and Experiences from Reading Yue Xiaodong's Basic Techniques of Psychological Counseling and Zeng Qifeng's Notes on Online Classroom.