FICTION IN THE THERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP THROUGH PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Abstract

The therapist is, in particular, an expert novelist who writes with the patient a story which has been lost in the “dark forest”; they create a“new story”, the one of the couple patient and therapist. In the analytic relationship patient’s story is told, deconstructed, revised, lived again and then placed in its dimension of personal myth to be compared with the analyst’s personal myth.

All that takes place in the particular “relational fiction”of the setting: proxemic space, times, fares, rules etc. The therapist does not often reply what the patient insistently asks him about his own private life because the fictional relation of the setting could turn into a real relationship. Scheherazade, in The Thousand and One Nights, like in an analytic context, tells his thousand and one stories, and faces as a therapist the king’s suffering taking care of it and saving herself and the King himself. The real treatment and the true cure develop through the “real” emotional and sentimental story which silently interlaces between Scheherazade and the King.

A “new story” begins when the patient enters the consulting room. The “story of a relationship”, based on the emotions of the therapist and the patient, creates a “new” emotional experience for them both which takes care of  the original injury and of the inferiority. The clinical history with the transfer and counter transfer relationship becomes a “real emotional story”, the one of the couple patient and therapist