ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on co-construction and intersubjectivity in psychotherapy. In contract to classic psychoanalytic theory, the chapter illustrates how the therapists’ personal experience, judiciously employed, can affect the therapy in positive as well as negative ways. The chapter challenges the classic notion that transference is an objective phenomenon, independent of the gender, physical appearance, age, manner of speaking, office décor, missed session policy, skin color, accent, and degree of interactivity of the analyst. The chapter provides a hypothetical example of how the very different personal experiences of two therapists could affect a therapy with the same patient for good and for not so good.
