ABSTRACT
Many authors have emphasized the complexity of the treatment relationship with adolescent patients (A. Freud, 1958; Bios, 1962; Giovacchini, 1974; Tylim, 1978; Gartner, 1985; Mishne, 1986; Bernstein and Glenn, 1988; Amodeo and Drouilher, 1992; Brandell, 1992; Anastasopoulos and Tsiantis, 1996). When adolescents have experienced severe trauma along with their developmental struggles, the analyst's emotional responsiveness to them becomes crucial—particularly the analyst's expression of tenderness. The therapeutic atmosphere of tenderness is, in the first instance, what will enable these patients to share their traumas. Historically, the early psychoanalytic literature about love focused on erotic love. In that literature, the analyst's "love" was more a love of truth than love for the patient. Ferenczi (1932), who treated traumatized patients, first recognized the significance of creating "maternal friendliness," love in the treatment context, and later used the word tenderness. He described tenderness as the preoedipal register of experience and explained the importance of this kind of response in the therapeutic setting.
Patients cannot believe that an event really took place, or cannot fully believe it, if the analyst, as the sole witness of the events, persists in his cool, unemotional, and, as patients are fond of stating, purely intellectual attitude, while the events are of a kind that must evoke, in anyone present, emotions of revulsion, anxiety, terror, vengeance, grief and the urge to render immediate help; to remove or destroy the cause or the person responsible; and since it is usually a child, an injured child, who is involved (but even leaving that aside), feelings of wanting to comfort it with love
[p. 24].