ABSTRACT
In psychotherapy, displacement by the patient consistently involves the shift away from a raw perception of the therapist onto someone else or some other situation. This chapter explores the key to understanding the material from patients which is self-knowledge and, in particular, the therapist's awareness of the implications of his or her own interventions. To know the patient, the therapist must know him or herself. The material from patients, once viewed as isolated intrapsychic products and expressions of transference and fantasy, must be understood as communicative adaptive responses and as efforts mainly to cope with the therapeutic relationship and interaction. There is no understanding the complexities of a patient's material without a full comprehension of the intricacies of the therapist's interventions. Thus, a therapist's self-comprehension, which serves as a basis for understanding the patient's material, is actually enhanced by the decoding of those very associations.
