Reflections on the clinician’s role in the clinical encounter

Abstract

A practicing Gestalt psychotherapist and academic researcher on the topic of burnout, Karin Mohn Engebretsen provides in this chapter a personal narrative from a professional perspective. The narration gives insight into the nature and impact of the healthcare practitioner’s influence on the clinical encounter. In the case study, Engebretsen puts herself in focus, touching on how her own dispositions affect the way that the patient’s dispositions manifest when she engages them in therapy. This is an essential aspect of the Gestalt approach, but Karin’s reflections go further to illustrate how the mutual manifestation of these dispositions can, in turn, interact as the treatment proceeds. This way the features of mutual manifestation and causal complexity, presented in Part I of this book, are placed at the very core of the clinical interaction itself. Indeed, the practitioner’s awareness of their own influence has an impact on the outcome and success of that treatment. In contrast with the biomedical model, which sees the patient as a passive subject of the treatment imposed upon them by the caregiver, both Gestalt theory and dispositionalism recognise that the treatment itself is something both the healthcare professional and the patient must be actively engaged in for it to work, as discussed in the first part of this book. Thus, the clinical encounter is essentially relational.