Sexual Attraction in Therapy

MysticalSoul

Heya,

I was just wondering if anyone knew of any good references and/or textbooks that dealt with how to work with clients who tell you that you are sexually attractive. I am curious as to at what point, are referrals necessary.

Thanks.

JuliusCaesar

why is the client saying this? Are you seeing a client who is saying this? Are you being adequately supervised? What is your response to this? is this part of transference? etc etc etc

Gibs

I would have to echo Julius' concern. If the enquiry relates to an actual client contact, it would be important to deal with it right away, preferably with appropriate supervision.

If it's just a general enquiry, then the short answer is that attraction between client and therapist (i.e. transference) is common (in both directions) and some therapy approaches would say that it can be used as part of the therapeutic process. Any good psychotherapy text will have a lot of stuff about transference.

Bateman and Brown's book "An introduction to Psychotherapy" might be a good place to start.

MysticalSoul

Am in good supervision. Is an actual client, but am not putting too many details on here, due to being available to the public domain. Both myself and my supervisor came to the same conclusion though, that perhaps this is what he does with females - says something without thinking, and then suffers the consequences. There has been huge learning in it for me, and my supervisor did say that she had not come across the situation I was describing before, so there was learning in it for both of us.

Odysseus

An interesting question and just to keep it general I'm suprised that you supervisor never experienced this before, the only thing I would add is that positive transference can quickly turn to negative transference, so maybe keep an eye out for this. Best of luck with it.

Yellow belly

Hi there,

The following book should be of use....

David Mann - Psychotherapy: An Erotic Relationship: Transference and Countertransference Passions

There's also : Erotic Transference and Counter Transference by the same author...

Both should be available via Amazon

Regards
YB

summerdays

It would be a very unusual therapeutic situation where attraction didn't emerge as an issue - what's your orientation? Any psychodynamic literature on transference and counter transference together with the case history and case notes should be enough to work with this material.