By Michelle Hines, University Relations
Contact: (336) 334-5371
Posted 2-27-08
Dr. Mona Shattell.
GREENSBORO, NC – In the old dispute between Freudians and Jungians, score one for Carl Gustav.
A recent study by a UNCG nursing professor confirms what many mental health professionals have known instinctively for years but Freudian dogma in the field has made taboo: Clients need their friendship, their physical warmth, even their bluntness.
“People want to be known as people, not just as people with a problem. They want to be seen as holistic beings. They want you to know about other aspects of their lives,” says Dr. Mona Shattell, who specializes in mental health nursing. “In the past, we have separated social relationships from therapeutic relationships; we’ve tried to keep it very separate. But now we’ve found they really want you to know them as you would a friend.”
Shattell completed the study with Sharon Starr, a PhD Nursing student at UNCG, and Dr. Sandra Thomas of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Their article, “‘Take My Hand, Help Me Out’: Mental Health Service Recipients’ Experience of the Therapeutic Relationship,” appeared in the International Journal of Mental Health Nursing.
Results were based on interviews with 20 mental health clients who spoke about their relationships with their therapists. They valued several qualities in therapists: understanding, honesty, touch, sharing personal stories and taking the time to get to know them.
“What’s cutting edge is that the findings are different from what has been taught,” Shattell says. “We were asking, What is it like to have someone understand you? And many of them felt misunderstood. Really it’s about human relatedness, and with someone with a mental illness, it takes it to a different level because of that stigma.”
It all goes back to the split between Sigmund Freud and his brilliant young protégée, Carl Jung.
Freud—although he invented psychotherapy and gave names to such essential concepts as the unconscious, transference and repression—took an authoritarian stance on the therapist-patient relationship, having his patients recline on sofas without making eye contact with him, Shattell says. She characterizes his fatal error as a reluctance to admit when he was wrong and to revise his theories.
Conversely, Jung treated his clients as equals, viewing psychotherapy as a two-way process that transforms both client and therapist for the better. He liked to sit eye-to-eye with his clients, and refused to label them as “patients.” He also used the metaphor of the Greek “temenos,” or “sacred place,” to describe the therapeutic space, Shattell says.
Her study vindicates Jung’s approach, although she warns that the therapist should never lose sight of the real goal. “It’s not done to make you feel good as a provider. It’s about what’s best for the client. That’s what makes it okay. And good. Not just okay, but good.”
Shattell’s findings have raised a lot of eyebrows in the psychotherapy community, prompting her and her co-authors to complete a second study that asks the question, What is it like to be misunderstood by your therapist?
Does Shattell see a philosophical shift in the future of psychotherapy?
“There’s no real concerted effort to create change, although there are a lot of mental health professionals who would like to see change. But the dominant paradigm’s so entrenched now. I think it’s going to be difficult. But not impossible.”
