Correspondence: Jeffrey I. Lewis, Ph.D., 163-03 Horace Harding Expressway, Suite 302, Flushing, New York 11365, USA. e-mail: psyentiste@aol.com

¹Jeffrey I. Lewis, Ph.D., Adjunct Associate Clinical Professor, St. John's University; Board of Directors and Faculty, Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, New York City; Member, American Psychological Association; Member, Phi Beta Kappa.

Abstract

Social Psychological research on Person Perception/Attribution Theory has concluded that an individual responds to interpersonal situations based upon their interpretation of the "nature" of that situation. For example, physically attractive people are often attributed niceness and capableness even without any basis in reality. The observer, guided by percepts cum attributions, may treat the attractive participant "as though" these qualities are about them rather than about the observer's internal bias. In psychoanalysis, this social phenomenon takes on individual meaning as countertransference. Therapists seem to experience irrational feelings during the psychotherapy exchange, which remain, whether or not the therapist is conscious of these responses or whether their technical objective includes or ignores their own transference. The attributional tendency to act upon these feelings "as though" they were wholly about the patient may lead to therapeutic disasters. Therefore, clinical training of psychotherapists needs the early inclusion of this concept to prevent subsequent dogmatic and untherapeutic attitudes. This paper will discuss the possibility of disarming the damage rendered by medicalized parsimonious "healing" and the latest fashion, Evidence-Based Treatment, via a translation of assumedly unmeasurable psychoanalytic tenets into multiply measured, investigated areas of social research.