Don't Lose Your Patients: Responding to Clients Who Want to Quit Treatment / Edition 1

by Herbert S Strean D.S.W.

Overview

Premature termination—patient dropout, in Dr. Herbert s. Strean's dependably conversational idiom—is a blow to the therapist's self-esteem, professional status, and pocketbook. Traditionally, responsibility for it has been imputed to the patient's resistance or lack or loss of motivation. In keeping with contemporary recognition that the therapeutic process is a reciprocally influential partnership, however, Dr. Strean teases out and examines the therapist's role in the divorce. He brings forty years of professional practice to the challenge of recommending appropriate interventions for sustaining the therapeutic relationship at whatever stage termination is threatened, be it right at the outset, during the honeymoon phase, in the face of the first treatment crisis, or later still. As a bonus, Dr. Strean shares his guiding perspectives on treatment. They include careful listening, a non-judgemental approach, and constant awareness of the therapist's own all-too-humannes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780765701718
Publisher:	Aronson, Jason Inc.
Publication date:	08/01/1998

About the Author

Herbert S. Strean, D.W.S., is distinguished professor emritus and Rutgers University and director emeritus of the New York Center for Psychoanalytic Training.

Editorial Reviews

Dr. Herbert Strean shares the thoughtful insights of an experienced and sensitive clinician about how we inadvertently push our patients out of treatment at each stage of the process from the first phone call on. Even the most seasoned of us will learn more about what we are doing—to the benefit of our case loads to be sure, but, more important, to the benefit of our patients.

Betram P. Karon

Dr. Strean's heartfelt, clinically expert conviction that preventing premature termination is essential in promoting healing stands in refreshing contrast to the prevailing managed care view that no psychotherapeutic process can be too brief.

Gerald Schames

Herbert Strean has a knack for tackling the most significant problems in the practice of psychotherapy and coming up with clear, pragmatic solutions. We know that the patient dropout rate is very high, and in this volume Dr. Strean analyzes the many reasons therapists lose clients, often before treatment has really begun. Using copious clinical vignettes and drawing on up-to-date psychodynamic concepts, he steers clinicians through the shoals of patients' ambivalence, resistance, and negative transference, as well as their own counterresistance and countertransference. The book's unadorned, jargon-free writing and abundant clinical wisdom make it a pleasure to read and an invaluable aid to both helping and keeping our patients.

Stanley B. Messer