Social Media and its Impact on Therapeutic Relationships

In the current age of social media, the boundaries between the online and the offline, the personal and the professional, have become blurred and ambiguous. This poses significant challenges to the practice of psychoanalysis, which for a long time has been thought of as a technology‐free and private space. This paper compares how social media impacts therapeutic relationships in the broader field of psychotherapy and in psychoanalytic psychotherapy in particular. Direct breaches in therapist privacy were found to be more frequent with non‐psychoanalytic psychotherapists due to therapists’ higher online presence. Psychoanalytic psychotherapists, on the other hand, generally have a lesser online presence because of different views on therapeutic anonymity from other clinical orientations. The author suggests that this leads to different forms of virtual impingements: due to the absence of psychoanalytic therapists’ online presence, patients seek to re‐create therapists (and, by extension, therapeutic situations) on a virtual level rather than discover something that was already ‘put out there’ by therapists. Virtual manifestations of anonymity, splitting, and solipsistic introjection processes are discussed with reference to John Suler's concept of the online disinhibition effect. Further recommendations for research on social media impact are discussed

Mapping the multiplicity of the self

In this commentary we offer a critique of the task devised by Hermans (2001): the PPR (Personal Position Repertoire). We first emphasize the important contributions made by Hermans and collaborators toward improving our understanding of the dialogical self, and then analyze several problems raised by this new method of studying the self. The issues we address are: the meaning of the concept of prominence; the possible reification of the positions adopted in this task; and the problem of the power differential between clients and psychologists.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio