TPC-Journal-V2-Issue3

The Professional Counselor \Volume 2, Issue 3 205 work with the client’s expected resistance (Hill, 2011). Goss (2006) adds that through the transference process, the client would have the opportunity to experience his internal feelings of emptiness at a conscious level—which is an obstacle to him developing an authentic self. They have maintained their real feelings of early loss through the fragile self. Psychodynamic counseling is about raising the client’s self-awareness and interpreting the client’s narrative by extracting meaning from the patterns and themes evolving from the narrative. In sum, psychodynamic counseling is the result of a well-educated guess based on the integration of the client’s history, the client’s response to the history, and the counselor’s clinical experience, training and knowledge. It is highly recommended that psychodynamic-oriented counselors go through counseling themselves before counseling clients (Holmes, 1999). In psychodynamic counseling the question is not whether the past is infringing upon the present, but rather, to what extent. In the case of the impotent king, the issue to analyze is the man’s motivation for maintaining his resistance to vulnerability. What is his outcome or payoff? It is conceived that during counseling the client is driven to protect himself from the anxiety triggered by intimacy (emotional and physical) (Jacobs, 1977; Kealy & Rasmussen, 2012). Resistance is the fuel behind the transference (Gabbard, 2009). There would be no transference if the client would be willing to speak directly rather than project those feelings and thoughts they deem unacceptable onto the counselor. Transference is a psychological phenomenon that may occur during counseling sessions when clients react to the counselor’s interpretation of events. Psychodynamic-oriented counselors act as detectives, listening with accurate, empathic understanding, looking for clues, and detecting themes and patterns (Holmes, 1999). They submit their interpretation to their clients as a guess or conjecture, not as solid fact, but rather inviting the client to fill in the gaps (Holmes, 1999). Nevertheless, clients may resist, which lets the counselors know they are on the right track to illuminating the core issue that brings them to counseling. Rooted in education, the psychodynamic counseling approach offers a road map to unresolved issues that begin and end with the quality of the counselor-client relationship (Holmes, 1999). Hartmann (2009) suggests that part of the counseling approach must include guiding the client to learn how to view himself “excluded from the parental relationship” (p. 2336). Unacknowledged early wounds create a discontinuity of “ordinary growth,” which leads to arrested development or acting out of a regressive state, such as withholding nurturing feelings from his wife to compensate for the deficits he feels he experienced growing up (Goss, 2006, p. 685). Emotional growth is necessary to develop a differentiation of the self that is separate from one’s parents (Kerr & Bowen, 1988). The counseling goal is to help these men grow up emotionally. Attempting to address this phenomenon, Herzog (2001) suggests that working through this emotional separation from the parents means the “unraveling and reconstruction of the past as it is encountered in the present” (p. 2). Encouraging the client to do an autopsy with the counselor about his family dynamics may be a way of engaging his cooperation towards his own recovery. Bringing the material in the unconscious to conscious awareness is the tenet of psychodynamic counseling. Goss (2006) insists that the challenge for counselors is not only to have the client acknowledge and grieve the loss of a perfect father or an ideal mother, but also to prevent the client from undoing the work achieved in one counseling session by returning to his fictitious self in the following session. Implications for Counselors In addition to the obvious challenges counselors face with some men who may harbor narcissistic vulnerabilities, Kealy and Rasmussen (2012) emphasize that clinicians are not exempt from narcissistic tendencies themselves, either overt or covert, which may be triggered during counseling sessions. As aforementioned, the psychodynamic counseling model recommends for counselors using this approach to go through counseling themselves before counseling their clients. Those counselors who might not engage in genuine self-awareness may unconsciously prevent their clients from engaging in transference during sessions, such as avoiding confrontations or “refusing to address the enactments” most likely because they may be unconsciously seeking approval or admiration from their clients (Luchner et al., 2008, p. 5). This desire for approval may be related to the supervisees’ narcissistic vulnerabilities, which may go undetected in some instances during supervision (Luchner et al., 2008).