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People see therapists for all sorts of reasons, from stress relief to guidance, from emotional pain to existential angst. The kind of therapy I write about works on problematic patterns of relating to others, to oneself, and to situations. These problematic patterns can be talked about or they can be reenacted in the therapy relationship; reenactment puts the therapist in a good position to change the pattern from within. One of the signature insights of psychoanalytic therapy is that the patient and the therapist will both reenact certain problematic patterns of relating whether they want to or not.
The most common problematic pattern arising from the therapist’s personality, in my experience, is the desire to be the good guy, the hero, a benign, approving, affirming, validating force in the patient’s life. When the relationship is organized around stress relief and comforting the patient, I think reasonable therapists can disagree about the utility of the affirming, validating approach with different clients at different times. But when the therapy is organized around changing a problematic pattern of relating, or when such problematic patterns are evoked, the desire to be the good guy spells trouble.
An analogy might help. If friends are at war, give them aid and comfort; supply them with troops and arms. If they are at war with themselves, give them peacekeepers and neutrality. If they are not at war with themselves, don't do individual psychotherapy with them!
Most problematic patterns of relating arise from abuse, neglect, spoiling, bad luck, or trauma. In other words, there’s a bad guy in the picture. With spoiling, it’s often harder to locate the bad guy, but at the heart of spoiling a child or spoiling oneself is a coalition against limits, where limits are cast as the bad guy. With the other sources of unhappiness, it’s pretty obvious that there is a malevolent force at work in the pattern.
I treated a narcissistic man whose autobiographical narrative included a humiliating father and an insufficiently protective mother. He often felt that he was on the verge of humiliation, so he adopted countermeasures, including putting down others before they could put him down. He had been in therapy twice before with therapists dedicated to affirming and validating his sense of self-worth, a coalition in the therapy relationship that villainized his parents. The second therapist had reportedly villainized the first therapist.
These therapists might not have noticed that even though they thought they were playing the role of supportive mentor, they were actually playing the role of an insufficiently protective mother, since there was nothing they could do to prevent whatever harms the father may have inflicted. And telling him that he didn’t deserve to be hated by himself because he was a good person was eerily similar to his memories of his mother telling him that he didn’t deserve to be treated poorly by his father.
I was quite willing to be cast as the humiliating father in this pattern. Early in my career, I resisted such casting, but as I got older, I stopped minding. Moments would arise in our work together when he would make me feel like humiliating him, and I would usually spot these and comment on them rather than reenact the pattern. Occasionally, I would unfortunately play out the part. For example, he made a simple arithmetic error when explaining something that had happened with his wife, and I unthinkingly corrected him. We were then able to process what had happened and reconcile. Our relationship, built around my role as the potential humiliator, gave us a chance to change the pattern in real-time as it played out between us.
I never once blamed and never once defended his father. Our work was organized around the way he treated himself and what he expected of others, not around what did or didn’t happen forty years earlier. He learned how to collaborate with others in building a relationship that could deal with potential humiliations, instead of learning to behave in relationships where humiliations were guaranteed not to occur.
When therapists insist on being the good guy, it evokes their blindness to what is going wrong in the therapy, just as America’s insistence on being the good guy invokes its blindness with respect to its social injustice and foreign crimes. I call this therapeutic privilege, capitalizing on the ability to ignore disconfirming information about the effects of our technique on the patient. Once you claim to be the source of affirmation, it’s hard to see how the affirmation itself might be humiliating.
When therapists insist on being the hero of the clinical story, they cast the patient in the role of damsel in distress, the “you poor dear” whose life is futile suffering and endless passivity. Or sometimes they recruit the patient into the quest to be the hero, and they throw gasoline on every smoldering conflict in the patient’s life, modeling self-righteousness rather than reflection and wisdom. (The therapist’s job is to resolve internal conflict, not to enlist the patient in the therapists’s battle and grudges.)
Heroic therapists are capable of great harm. Once you decide that you are the good guy in a drama, you stop checking your motives and second-guessing your behaviors. None of the conflicts that arise with patients can be your fault; some therapists will blame patients for these conflicts, but most will blame the patient’s parents or the patient’s friends, lovers, and teachers. Self-proclaimed good guys are justified in engaging in all sorts of unsavory behavior, such as denouncing others, pulling rank, and canceling appointments.
These therapeutic harms are clearly not as bad as mass shootings and inquisitions that have also arisen from certainty about the righteousness of one’s cause, but they are still harmful. Tolstoy summarized the hero complex thusly: "Clearly it was Napoleon’s long-standing conviction that the possibility of mistakes did not exist for him, and to his mind, everything he did was good, not because it agreed with any notion of what was good and bad, but because he did it."
I ended my book on child abuse with this:
“When service providers cling to benign roles, we are not heard by abusive or neglectful [systems]. In benign roles, we are at best righteous and at worst self-righteous, rather than being organized around creating change. When we insist on being the good guys, we evoke a defensive or a balancing response from families, and we are typically ineffective. I agree that the ends do not justify the means, that unnecessarily harsh practices cannot be condoned… But while the ends may not justify the means, neither do the means justify the ends. Bad outcomes should not be applauded merely because they were produced by gentle, optimistic, and humane methods.”
References
Karson, M. (2001). Patterns of child abuse: How dysfunctional transactions are replicated in individuals, families, and the child welfare system. Haworth.
