Impediments to the experience of being loved in psychotherapy

Abstract

There appears to be increasing acceptance amongst therapists that psychotherapy involves a 'cure through love', as first expressed ninety years ago by Sigmund Freud. Ferenzci, Suttie,  Halmos, Laing, Yalom, Greben, Hobson, Lomas and Valliant are among those who have expressed this view. Closer to home Dr Eng-Kong Tan, analytic psychotherapist of Sydney, alluded to it with sensitivity and wisdom in his keynote address to the 1991 Annual Conference of NZAP. I think it is likely that Dr Maurice Bevan-Brown, whom we particularly honour in connection with the 50th anniversary of NZAP, would have concurred. It is certainly, in my reading, consistent with The Sources of Love and Fear, the little book he produced for a lay audience and first published in 1950. In a brief section on psychotherapy, good psychotherapy is based on providing the patient with 'a new and more adequate parent', and for Bevan-Brown a loving attitude is the essence of good parenting.