ABSTRACT
Peter Rober writes about a first session with a family with a rebellious teenage son, a mother, and father. The mother begins to cry before she even opens her mouth, and the father is bristly and abrupt in his first interactions with the therapist. Impasse is part and parcel of everyday therapy practice and, not surprisingly, it is a main refrain of supervision. This chapter explores the therapist’s position in the experience of impasse. It begins with a description of impasse and the emotional and interactional constellation that can gather around it. To think of therapeutic impasse as a description of times when the process of therapy becomes stuck serves as a rough beginning point for the author's discussion, and yet this very general description covers a number of different kinds of experience and it is also shorthand for an emotional and interactional constellation that can gather around the family, the therapist, and the therapeutic relationship.
