Essay Questions

Explicate Gottlieb’s ideology in “If the Queen Had Balls.”

The therapist asserts, “Certainly we all have our deal-breakers. But when patients repeatedly engage in this kind of analysis, sometimes I’ll say, ‘ If the queen had balls, she’d be the king.’ If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don’t recognize that ‘the perfect is the enemy of the good’ you may deprive yourself of joy. At first patients are taken aback by my bluntness, but ultimately it saves them months of treatment.” The therapist’s remarks emphasize the prospect of rebuffing joy owing to excessive perfectionism. Had the Queen been selective by insisting to be crowned as King, her probabilities of being the monarch would dissolve. The Queen has no other option, considering her gender, than to be Queen. Being fastidious hampers one’s contentment and prospects of progressing in life.

How does Gottlieb undermine Freud’s ideology on the patient-therapist interrelationship? - “Namast’ay in Bed”

Gottlieb elucidates, “ Freud argued that “the physician should be impenetrable to the patient and like a mirror, reflect nothing but what is shown to him.” Nowadays, though, most therapist use some form of what’s known as self-disclosure in their work, whether it’s sharing some of their own reactions that come up during the session or acknowledging that they watch TV show that a patient keeps referring to.” Psychoanalysts are conventional mortals whose experiences could be comparable to the patients’. Endeavoring to be impenetrable can be an obstacle in advancing constructively throughout therapy. Consequently, Freud’s assertion is not pertinent in modern-day frameworks. Patients and psychoanalysts ought to connect unconditionally for the therapies to yield healthy results.