Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- A note on terminology
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Establishing the concerns
- 2 Values
- 3 What life means. Emotional flavour
- 4 Narrating the treatment: the formulation, reformulation and therapeutic contract
- 5 Narrating the self
- 6 Procedures for gaining relief
- 7 Resolution: finding out what's doing this to me
- 8 Universal technique for resolving predicaments
- 9 Relinquishment and releasement: changing something about me
- 10 Re-narration: finding happiness
- 11 Crises, and how to surmount them
- Appendix: confidential record
- References
- Index
8 - Universal technique for resolving predicaments
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- A note on terminology
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Establishing the concerns
- 2 Values
- 3 What life means. Emotional flavour
- 4 Narrating the treatment: the formulation, reformulation and therapeutic contract
- 5 Narrating the self
- 6 Procedures for gaining relief
- 7 Resolution: finding out what's doing this to me
- 8 Universal technique for resolving predicaments
- 9 Relinquishment and releasement: changing something about me
- 10 Re-narration: finding happiness
- 11 Crises, and how to surmount them
- Appendix: confidential record
- References
- Index
Summary
Malan has written a primer of time-limited dynamic psychotherapy whose purpose is similar to that of the present book. Right in the middle of the book, he writes: ‘… the technique that I have described is much more active than the traditional psychoanalytic technique … I call it the universal technique [author's italics], because I think that, no matter what part of the world a reasonably well-trained therapist comes from, this is most frequently the technique that he instinctively uses’ (1979, p. 94).
The Universal technique is to consider two triangles: the triangle of conflict, and what Menninger (1958) called ‘the triangle of insight’. The triangle of conflict is Malan's formulation of what is here called the predicament. There is a hidden feeling or impulse, against which there is a defence, and there is anxiety. This formulation is straightforwardly Freudian. It appears in a different guise in the work of Dorothy Stock Whitaker, where it is termed ‘the disturbing motive’ (impulse), ‘the reactive motive’ (defence) and ‘the displaced motive’ (anxiety), and in the work of Malan's colleague, Ezriel (1950). He used the terms ‘the avoided relationship’ (impulse), ‘the calamitous relationship’ (defence) and ‘the required relationship’ (anxiety).
The suggestion that the relief of an emotional predicament universally involves addressing a hidden feeling seems right. We may even simplify this by thinking of a hidden feeling as the personal experience of a predicament.
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- Information
- Psychotherapy and Counselling in PracticeA Narrative Framework, pp. 193 - 206Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002