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Biomedical subjects

R M Billow

Publications and source records attributed to R M Billow.

8 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

The therapist's anxiety and resistance to group therapy.

When therapists contemplate starting groups, consider placing an individual patient within an existing group, or respond to the group reconfigurations when members are added or replaced, it raises their anxieties and resistances. Under these circumstances, the therapist must contend with many intersubjective factors: dread, fear, and idealization of groups; contagion and amplification of psychological phenomena; absorption in the group mentality; magnification of the therapist's centrality and importance; exposure and disturbance of existing relationships, and utilization of one's own emerging and evolving thoughts, feelings, and fantasies, along with the group's. Therapists learn about themselves and their groups by reviewing their countertransference, being alert to possible enactments, and listening to their patients, whose anxieties and resistances to group often reflect their own.

Anxiety↗
PubMed2001

The class that would not read: utilizing Bion's affect theory in group.

While Bion's group theory continues to inspire contemporary group psychotherapists, his theory of human emotion is not as well known. Bion also introduced a system of alphabetical and mathematic symbols to offer a shorthand for his epistemology in order to make his ideas accessible, flexible, and practical for the working clinician. This article presents aspects of Bion's theory and metapsychological shorthand to conceptualize effectual dimensions of group process, thinking operations, and countertransference. The constructs considered include Klein's paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions; manic defenses; basic assumptions; "proto-mental" and "pre-monitory" emotions; instinctive drives L, H, and K (plus or minus); beta elements; and alpha functioning. With these ideas, the author was able to work through aspects of a group experience in which, as leader, he unknowingly found himself at an opposite affective pole from the members.

Affect↗
PubMed2000

From countertransference to "passion".

Bion's ideas may be extended to describe an emotional phenomenology of the analyst's subjectivity and a methodology which helps differentiate countertransference enactments from fuller emotional participation. Bion called the process of integrating and utilizing one's most basic and important emotions to make meaning, "passion." The analyst's primal feelings--of love, hate, and curiosity--serve as a central organizer of meaning in the analytic interaction. These feelings involve pain, and to the extent the analyst unconsciously decides to evade or foreclose the evolution of the feelings, such that they remain unintegrated in the thinking process, the analyst is liable to become mired in repetitive transference-countertransference experiences without establishing fresh meaning. A case example illustrates the relevance of "passion" to contemporary relational theory and practice.

Adult↗
PubMed1999

An intersubjective approach to entitlement.

Entitlement is an emotionally based but not necessarily pathological mode of experiencing psychic reality, one which belongs to both analyst and patient participating in the inter-subjective matrix. I use myself as an example of an analyst who initially believed he was constructively analyzing treatment-resistant entitlements. The course of the work involved identifying expressions of entitlement in myself, as well as in the patient or supervisee. I came to understand that distinctions such as normal or pathological, entitled or counterentitled, often become irrelevant. The focus of the work shifts toward uncovering the bidirectionality of entitlement experiences, revealing the varying elements of entitlement and discovering how they function in the therapeutic relationship.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

Entitlement and counterentitlement in group therapy.

Groups may provide fertile ground for observing, understanding, and working through feelings and fantasies of being special or exceptional. Such manifestations of the psychology of entitlement, which traditionally have been referred to as an aspect of narcissism and a problem of the patient, may be studied in the interactional field encompassing therapist, supervisor, and group. Entitlement may represent both normal and pathological processes, the former relating to self-affirmation, the latter, to the expression of omnipotent thinking and controlling behavior. Entitlement may characterize a developmental stage or process, resistance, an interplay between or among members, including the therapist, and a primary unconscious fantasy expressed in symbolism and dreams. Using myself as an example, I illustrate how the clinician may elucidate entitlement in group and supervisory experience and address how his or her entitlements contribute to the relational matrix.

Female↗
PubMed1990

The interviewer's "presenting problems" in the initial interview.

Complex countertransference responses that contribute to the interviewer's presenting problems in the initial interview with a patient are related to: the clinician's preinterview fantasies, the interviewee's empirical reality, and the patient as experienced creatively. Presenting problems may be an unavoidable component of clinical contact, but when the interviewer responds to them with psychological-mindedness, they can contribute to realistic assessment and positive case disposition.

Countertransference↗
PubMed1980

On reunion.

Explore the source record for details and available documents.

Adolescent↗