Jesse D Geller

• Doctor of Psychology
• Yale University

A brief essay that discusses the significance of Marshall McLuhan’s (1967) The Medium is the Massage in the context of online psychotherapy currently required in the pandemic of covid-19.

The primary aim of this issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychology: In Session is to demonstrate the myriad ways in which movies, their viewing and discussion, can be used to serve therapeutic and educational purposes. It collects together eight essays, an empirical study, and a film script that offer shifting perspectives on questions that are of...

Psychotherapeutic treatment tends to have a high attrition rate (“premature termination”) and there have been multiple efforts to help new patients, including those considering treatment, better understand the nature and expectations inherent to this process as a means to improve retention and outcome. These efforts are often grouped under the term...

This issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychology: In Session contains seven essays that give expression to three basic convictions. The first is that therapists who are consistently able to help their patients make constructive changes in their lives practice psychotherapy creatively, whether or not they conceive of therapy as an applied science or...

This introduction to this issue of JCLP: In Session (“Reflections of Senior Therapists”) focuses on the multifaceted ways in which adult development influences what it means to be a psychotherapist and to do the work of psychotherapy. This issue brings together first person narratives written by a group of eminent psychotherapists as well as an emp...

The primary aim of this article was to demonstrate the clinical utility of an empirically grounded perspective on the complex interplay between patients' attachment style and their ability to create, remember, and use benignly influential representations of their experiences with their therapists. We focused on 2 interrelated questions: Are there s...

This article explores the ways in which receiving, providing, and teaching others to do psychotherapy have influenced my adult development. In my 70s, I arrived at the conviction that at every stage of adulthood, practicing psychotherapy has had a direct and causal influence on my efforts to fill my personal life with meaning, virtue, and maturity....

In this article, an autobiographical and narrative format is used to explore the connections between receiving personal therapy and providing it. The author describes the multiple origins and evolution of his psychoanalytically informed framework for thinking about what it means to be a therapist and to do the work of therapy. He draws on his own e...

This article introduces a special issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychology: In Session that provides 6 psychologists' narrative accounts of their own personal therapies and a practice-friendly research review on the characteristics of therapist-patients and their own treatment experiences. In response to a standard set of questions, highly exper...

Factors affecting the recall, forms, themes, and phenomenological properties of internalized representations of the psychotherapist and the psychotherapeutic relationship were investigated in a sample (n = 206) of both current and former patients. Subjects' responses on the Therapist Representation Inventory (TRI) indicated that representations of...

The primary aim of this study was to investigate the ways in which therapists-in-training construct and use mental representations of their relationships with their supervisors in the service of their own professional development. A total of 115 trainees (75% of whom were psychodynamically oriented) completed The Supervisory Representation Inventor...

Every day psychotherapists are called upon to assuage and give meaning to human suffering. This report examines the ways in which therapists' and patients' attitudes towards giving and receiving "pity" can advance or interfere with the realization of these goals. Clinical observations, introspective analyses, interviews, and questionnaires are used...

The vocabulary of style is used in this article to address the following questions: How can the authors improve on our methods of teaching therapists to attune the ways in which they listen and speak to meet the communicative requirements of each patient? What does it mean to practice psychotherapy scientifically? Are the technical and relational a...

In the intervals between psychotherapy sessions, patients often make use of the experiences that they have during sessions with their therapists, but these "intersession processes" (ISP) have been largely neglected in psychotherapy research. This study presents a German version of the Intersession Experience Questionnaire (IEQ, Orlinsky et al. ) ca...

This article is an effort to integrate contemporary psychoanalytic and existential perspectives on intentional therapist self-disclosure. It offers a two-stage decision-making model that considers self-disclosure from the vantage points of style and internalization. Clinical and research findings are presented to support the notion that the meaning...

The purpose of this study was to investigate attributes of mental representations of therapists by patients with specific personality disorders (PDs), schizotypal (STPD), borderline (BPD), avoidant (AVPD), and obsessive-compulsive (OCPD), and a comparison group with Major Depressive Disorder and no PD (MDD). The Therapist Representation Inventory-I...

Using a new measure, the Patient Representation Inventory (PRI), this study investigated the nature of psychotherapists' working clinical models of their patients. The data provided by 73 therapists suggest that, regardless of experience level or theoretical orientation (cognitive-behavioral or psychodynamic), therapists tend to evoke such represen...

This study examined psychotherapists' experiences in conducting treatment with fellow mental health professionals. 349 psychologists (35% response) rated the extent to which their therapeutic approach with psychotherapists differed from their approach with laypersons of comparable intelligence, socioeconomic status, and diagnosis. Respondents also...

This chapter explores the experiences of the author in different psychoanalytic psychotherapies, their initial difficulties, learning how to use therapy, and their own approaches to therapy. The primary purpose of this chapter is to further explore the connections between the continuing and particular roles each of the therapies played in determini...

In this volume, distinguished contributors explore the multifaceted nature of the psychotherapy of psychotherapists from “both sides of the couch.” The first-person narratives, clinical wisdom, and research findings gathered together in this title offer guidance about providing effective treatments to therapist-patients. Part I presents multiple th...

Examines responses from 349 psychologists of the American Psychological Association (APA) Division of Psychotherapy who completed a questionnaire regarding the prevalence of treating fellow psychotherapists, the type of psychotherapist-patients they treated, and the stressors and satisfactions of conducting such work. Three fourths of respondents r...

Using a cross-sectional design, the forms, functional themes, and corresponding affects of clients' (n = 88) representations of their therapists were compared across three distinct time phases of therapy: up to one year, between one and three years, and more than three years. Results indicated that clients in the beginning phase of therapy were les...

Investigated the ways in which patient and therapist gender influence the nature of patients' internalized representations of their therapist and the therapeutic relationship. A sample of 66 patients (29 males) completed the Therapist Representation Inventory (J. D. Geller et al, 1982), a self-report instrument designed to assess discrete propertie...

Explores the clinical utility of conceptualizing the intensity and direction of psychotherapists' interest in their patients in terms of the interdependent aspects of the patient–therapist relationship. An evolving interpretive framework is presented that takes into account the affective, cognitive, and motivational properties and the object-relati...

This article presents a psychodynamic framework and research methods for investigating the significance of patients' internal representations of therapy-with-their-therapists. In this article, 2 instruments developed for this purpose--the Therapist Representation Inventory and the Intersession Experience Questionnaire--are introduced, and their psy...

Presents a psychodynamic framework and research methods for investigating the significance of patients' internal representations of therapy-with-their-therapists. In this article, 2 instruments developed for this purpose (Therapist Representation Inventory and Intersession Experience Questionnaire) are introduced, and their psychometric characteris...

Analyzed the mood, interactions, and themes in the manifest dream representations reported by 67 25–71 yr old psychotherapist volunteers, who each reported 1 dream about his/her own therapist. Ss tended to have unpleasant dreams featuring therapists who were frustrating or gratifying. In the dreams, friendly, aggressive, and sexual interactions wer...

Close examination of pairing in a weekly, videotaped outpatient group of schizophrenic patients made clear that this is a complex and multifaceted dynamic. Pairing appears to begin with the formation of group dyads but group support is needed before dyad formation becomes true pairing. Issues and conflicts reflecting various developmental levels ar...

This report describes an approach to studying the ways in which psychotherapy patients create and interpret “mental representations” of their psychotherapists and the psychotherapeutic process both during therapy and after termination. We will briefly present our concepts, method and some normative data regarding the complex processes which recreat...

This paper presents a theoretical and methodological approach to studying the ways in which psychotherapy patients create and interpret mental representations of their therapists and the psychotherapeutic process both during therapy and after termination. A network of measures, The Therapist Representation Inventory, was developed to specify the in...

The present study was designed to investigate empirically responses of therapists to the process of terminating dyadic psychotherapy and to examine some personality correlates of these responses. A questionnaire was constructed to tap both managerial and affective responses to termination; this inventory, along with a measure of personal boundary m...

Eighty-three male psychotherapists varying on A-B type and experience orally responded to tape-recordings of simulated schizoid and neurotic patients in the privacy of their own offices. Five dimensions of therapist response were studied: accurate empathy, positive social-emotional reactions, negative social-emotional reactions, length of response...

Without Abstract

83 practicing male psychotherapists completed the A-B Scale of H. Schiffman et al (1967), responded to recordings of schizoid and neurotic patient prototypes, and rated their subjective reactions to each type. Multivariate analysis revealed a significant overall A-B Type by Patient Type interaction. Although liking and ease of responding were highe...

83 practicing male psychotherapists completed the A-B Scale of H. Schiffman et al (1967), responded to recordings of schizoid and neurotic patient prototypes, and rated their subjective reactions to each type. Multivariate analysis revealed a significant overall A-B Type by Patient Type interaction. Although liking and ease of responding were highe...

An overview of the current “therapeutic marketplace” (Frank, 1972) reveals the proliferation, and increasing popularity, of a wide range of body- or movement-oriented therapies, e.g., orgone therapy (Reich, 1949), bioenergetic analysis (Lowen, 1967), postural-relearning (Feldenkrais, 1949), Rolf structural integration (Rolf, 1963), psychomotortrain...

This study is concerned with an attempt to determine whether meaningful utilization review criteria could be productively generated by viewing a patient population from a developmental perspecitve. During a 2-year period, a multidisciplinary panel at Yale University sought to identify the sociodemographic, clinical, and administrative issues posed...

This study is concerned with an attempt to determine whether meaningful utilization review criteria could be productively generated by viewing a patient population from a developmental perspective. During a 2-year period, a multidisciplinary panel at Yale University sought to identify the sociode-mographic, clinical, and administrative issues posed...

In order to examine issues relevant to the authority which patients bestow upon psychiatrists the present authors constructed the Psychiatrist's Sphere of Influence Scale (PSIS). The PSIS is a 68-item Likert-type questionnaire which asks patients to specify the skills which they believe belong to the psychiatrist's authoritative domain. Patients be...

Asked 134 prominent psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, and behavior therapists to fill out the Whitehorn-Betz A-B therapist scale and comment on their possible differential effectiveness in treating schizoid-schizophrenic vs neurotic patients. Psychometric analysis of the 95 responses disclosed that their scale scores were reliable, distributed comp...

Members of a nationwide sample of prominent psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, and behavior therapists were asked to fill out the A-B therapist 'type' scale and comment on their possible differential effectiveness in treating schizoid/schizophrenic versus neurotic patients. Psychometric analysis (N=95) disclosed that their scale scores were reliable...

To test the widely held belief that fee assessment policy affects the psychotherapeutic process, data were gathered from the records of 434 clients who had received individual outpatient psychotherapy at a mental health center in 1972. The 3 predictor variables were fee (no payment, welfare, insurance, scaled payment, and full payment), diagnosis (...

81 male practicing psychotherapists rated themselves and an unknown male and unknown female adult on 82 bipolar sex-role relevant adjectives. Results show that both A and B therapists considered themselves equally masculine, but that A therapists were more likely to ascribe to themselves traditional feminine characteristics.

Attempts to (a) articulate some of the suppositions implicit in different approaches used to study nonverbal behaviors as communication, (b) reemphasize a conceptual distinction between nonverbal behaviors which can be considered as communications and other nonverbal behaviors, (c) reformulate some issues in the study of such behaviors, (d) establi...

Describes the use of the Psychotherapy Expectancy Inventory (PEI) and reports validity studies. Research and clinical data have identified 4 role-expectancy categories: nurturant, critical, self-reliant, and cooperative. Based on this framework, the PEI consists of questions beginning with "How strongly do you expect . . . " which are rated on 7-po...

Discusses "Cinema and Psychiatry", a unique mental health film festival, the first conference specifically designed to bring together mental health professionals and film makers to exchange ideas and to encourage the study and use of films in mental health. Sponsored jointly by Yale University Department of Psychiatry, the Connecticut Mental Health...

the aim of this chapter is to introduce readers to this new area of research [patients' representations of the therapist and therapy] / [focuses] successively on the clarification of theoretical concepts, the operationalization of those concepts in [the authors'] research instruments, the psychometric characteristics of these instruments, initial r...

delineating the various influences of separation on modification on representational structures during the psychotherapy process examines the developmental role of separation and loss experiences in forming representations of the self and other (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

This article is an effort to integrate contemporary psychoanalytic and exis- tential perspectives on intentional therapist self-disclosure. It offers a two- stage decision-making model that considers self-disclosure from the vantage points of style and internalization. Clinical and research findings are pre- sented to support the notion that the me...