Mysteries of the Mind | Episode #34 | “Testing In Psychotherapy”

Psychotherapy can be understood as the process by which the therapist and patient work to disconfirm the pathogenic beliefs that the patient acquired growing up, beliefs that cause the patient to feel distress.  One of the central ways that this occurs is through testing. There are two kinds of tests—transference tests and passive-into-active tests. In transference tests, the patient experiences the therapist as if the therapist was a problematic parent. In passive-into-active testing, the patient enacts the role of the problematic parent and assigns the therapist the role that the patient was in as the child of that parent.  Examples are given of each type of test. In each case, the patient gets better if the therapist contradicts his or her assigned role. If the therapist re-enacts the patient’s childhood relationships, then the test is failed and the patient doesn’t get better.