ABSTRACT
It can be a seductive idea to imagine that patients will benefit from good experience in an analysis or therapy. And some colleagues have felt driven to provide such good experience, for example by being especially positive or helpful in their analytic manner. Occasionally a patient may be able to respond positively to such treatment, but in the author's view this is both rare and unlikely to endure. Patients can discover an objective reality in which the object is found to have a strength of its own, surviving in its own right rather than through the patient’s phantasized protection of it. If an analyst/therapist is being deliberately ‘good,’ a patient can feel manipulated into having good feelings for the therapist. And, of course, the analyst/therapist who is seen as good would, in the patient’s mind, not warrant being subjected to those negative feelings that are directed towards others who are experienced more clearly as letting the patient down.
