ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how something as natural and unpretentious as relational talk therapy gets to be wonderfully good. It explains how relational therapy builds lasting emotional well-being, people spend time with selfobject transference. The painful feelings of those difficult times may be connected to traumatic model scenes, but they, too, are stirred up by everyday failures of empathy and understanding. When relationship goes wrong in everyday ways, the pain is no less bad for being ordinary. Both the hard times and the good times are set in motion by a relational therapist's empathy. Robert Stolorow and George Atwood, theorists of an intersubjective version of self psychology, call the oscillation between hope and dread in therapy a shift between two dimensions of transference. Simply put, a selfobject experience is a self-with-other experience that feels supportive, enlivening, comforting, freeing, and life-enhancing. The attachment theory, kinds of relatedness, motivational systems, and self-for-other perspectives are also discussed.
