THE CORRECTIVE EXPERIENCE; RE-EXPERIENCING THE OLD, CONSTRUCTING THE NEW

Martha Stark, M.D

In deficiency-compensation models of therapeutic action, the locus of the therapeutic action is thought to involve the therapist’s provision of some form of corrective experience. The healing is believed to require a real experience in the present with a new object, an experience in the here-and-now that compensates for the damage sustained early-on at the hands of the infantile object. It is in the context of the relationship between client and therapist that there is thought to be opportunity for reparation—this new relationship a corrective for the old one.

In psychomotor psychotherapy the therapeutic action is also thought to involve the therapist’s provision of some form of corrective experience. But now the emphasis is on the client’s experiencing of good not in the present but in the past. In essence, healing is thought to take place within the context of the client’s “construction” of memories of what she wishes had happened (“false positive memories,” if you will), mindbody memories that are internally registered as believable alternatives. These new, salutary virtual memories do not replace the old, pathogenic real memories of what had actually happened but take up residence alongside of those old memories.

In other words, whereas in corrective-provision models of psychoanalytic psychotherapy the emphasis is on the provision in the here-and-now of missing positive early-on experiences, in psychomotor psychotherapy the emphasis is on the provision in the there-and-then of those experiences.

Also of note is the fact that, although much attention has been paid in the psychoanalytic literature to the client’s need to be failed and her active efforts to re-create—with her therapist—the old bad object situation (by way of provocative enactment) in an effort to achieve belated mastery of it, scant attention has been paid in the literature to the client’s equally powerful need to find now what she never experienced and her active efforts to create opportunities for such restitution. In psychomotor psychotherapy the client is given the space to enact her need for a “corrective experience” by drawing the object into participating as the ideal parent she should have had but did not.

· Taken from document prepared by Martha Stark

for the Annual Meeting of Division 39

of the American Psychological Association,

Boston, August 14 - 17, 2008

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