The Corrective Emotional Experience
'In the forties...Franz Alexander, following the lead of Sandor Ferenczi, proposed...the form of a "corrective emotional experience", which enjoyed an enormous vogue'.
Alexander stated:
| “ | The patient, in order to be helped, must undergo a corrective emotional experience suitable to repair the traumatic influence of previous experiences. It is of secondary importance whether this corrective experience takes place during treatment in the transference relationship, or parallel with the treatment in the daily life of the patient. | ” |
The concept provoked much controversy, provoking opposition from figures as disparate as Kurt Eissler, Edward Glover, and Jacques Lacan, who later said 'I did not hesitate to attack it myself in the most categorical way...at the 1950 Congress of Psychiatry, but, it is the construction of a man of great talent'.
By the sixties, Alexander's conception was in retreat, and at the close of the following decade an analyst could ask rhetorically 'Who talks about Franz Alexander today — except those who want to put down his "corrective emotional experience" or to deny, as the Kohutians are at constant pains to do, that they are offering more of the same?'. Ongoing developments in object relations theory and the rise of self psychology would however lead to a revival of interest in the idea.
It was championed again 'by Moberly (1985). In the latter's view, corrective emotional experience represents essentially what is therapeutic in analysis'. Even those with continuing reservations about the idea conceded that 'when Alexander was writing...it was pertinent for him to be drawing attention to the therapeutic value of the emotional experience of patients in analysis'.
In the twenty-first century, the term has passed into commom psychodynamic parlance. Thus notions of testing the relationship in cognitive therapy are seen as 'not dissimilar to the notion of the "corrective emotional experience" in psychodynamic therapy'; elucidation in existential therapy as opening up 'new experiences with the therapist, thus providing a corrective interpersonal experience'.
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