ABSTRACT
The initial psychotherapeutic interview is a stimulus to self activation, and as such it evokes both the patient's painful affects and the defenses against those affects. An essential contribution to the task is the therapist's attitude of therapeutic neutrality and objectivity. The therapist's personal emotions are not involved in the treatment, which allows the therapist to be in the best position to make decisions in the patient's best therapeutic interest. The therapeutic stance contains a number of implied attitudes toward the patient and the work that express the frame for the psychotherapy. The therapist has to be more careful to maintain therapeutic neutrality because he or she is going to have difficult resistances to work through and wants to make sure that conditions are optimum. Therapeutic alliance is a real-object relationship in which the therapist and patient agree to work together to help the patient improve through better understanding and control.
