Abstract: | This article describes the 3-year psychoanalytic treatment of a blind female client by a blind female therapist supervised by a sighted man. The author focuses primarily on issues tied to each party's personal experience of blindness. Interpersonal psychoanalysis, which was the modality of supervision and therapy, is considered a cultural approach to psychoanalytic treatment. The author (the supervisor in the triad) suggests that the individuals involved treated each other, and were treated, with regard to their shared visual problems in ways that were influenced by previous relationships and the way that the culture in which the members were embedded treats disability in general. In the present, these cultural and relational expectations, influenced by the past, were played out between patient and therapist, between therapist and supervisor, and in the decisions and policies of the clinic system. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |