The Danger of Counter-Transference and Need for Patient Voice in A. M. Homes’s In a Country of Mothers (1993) and Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase (2012): “Story It”
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Erica D. Galioto
Abstract
A. M. Homes’s In a Country of Mothers (1993) and Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase (2012) offer fictional representations of the therapeutic process. Each features a female patient who is victimized by a therapist who allows their own counter-transference to prevent the patient’s voice from emerging. Instead of healing, these transferences impose therapist-directed narratives on young women who need to tell their own stories of loss and confusion. After tracing Freud’s changing ideas on transference, this article presents literary examples of counter-transference gone awry. In a Country of Mothers features a therapist who believes her patient is the daughter she gave up for adoption and who uses her own counter-transference to propel a dangerous relationship between the two women; Dora: A Headcase offers a modern-day rewriting of Freud’s “Dora” case study by a teen who resists the counter-transference of her therapist by writing her own story. This examination of literary counter-transference problematizes the supposed neutrality of the therapist and stresses the importance of patient voice in psychotherapeutic healing.
References
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Introduction
- The Aesthetics and Politics of Psychotherapy: Literary, Cultural, and Media Perspectives on ‘Healing the Soul’
- Articles
- Section I: Psychotherapy and Serial Television
- Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and the Aesthetics of Serial Narration in The Sopranos (1999–2007)
- Section II: Narratives of Psychotherapy
- The Danger of Counter-Transference and Need for Patient Voice in A. M. Homes’s In a Country of Mothers (1993) and Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase (2012): “Story It”
- Towards a Poetics of Trauma and Healing: Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015) and Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk (2014)
- Section III: Theatre and/as Psychotherapy
- Theatre and Communal Movement as Forms of Trauma Therapy in Gregory Burke’s Black Watch (2007)
- Therapy-as-Theatre: Porosity and Circulations of Feeling in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2014) and Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing (2013)
- Book Reviews
- Stefanie Schäfer: Yankee Yarns: Storytelling and the Invention of the National Body in Nineteenth-Century American Culture
- Marzia Milazzo: Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power.
- Julia Leyda: Anthroposcreens: Mediating the Climate Unconscious
- Alexandra Hartmann: The Black Humanist Tradition in Anti-Racist Literature: A Fragile Hope
- Barbara Buchenau, Jens Martin Gurr, and Maria Sulimma: City Scripts: Narratives of Postindustrial Urban Futures
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Introduction
- The Aesthetics and Politics of Psychotherapy: Literary, Cultural, and Media Perspectives on ‘Healing the Soul’
- Articles
- Section I: Psychotherapy and Serial Television
- Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and the Aesthetics of Serial Narration in The Sopranos (1999–2007)
- Section II: Narratives of Psychotherapy
- The Danger of Counter-Transference and Need for Patient Voice in A. M. Homes’s In a Country of Mothers (1993) and Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase (2012): “Story It”
- Towards a Poetics of Trauma and Healing: Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015) and Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk (2014)
- Section III: Theatre and/as Psychotherapy
- Theatre and Communal Movement as Forms of Trauma Therapy in Gregory Burke’s Black Watch (2007)
- Therapy-as-Theatre: Porosity and Circulations of Feeling in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2014) and Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing (2013)
- Book Reviews
- Stefanie Schäfer: Yankee Yarns: Storytelling and the Invention of the National Body in Nineteenth-Century American Culture
- Marzia Milazzo: Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power.
- Julia Leyda: Anthroposcreens: Mediating the Climate Unconscious
- Alexandra Hartmann: The Black Humanist Tradition in Anti-Racist Literature: A Fragile Hope
- Barbara Buchenau, Jens Martin Gurr, and Maria Sulimma: City Scripts: Narratives of Postindustrial Urban Futures
