One of my main interest is relationships. Relationships are a source of fun, joy, excitement, meaning and intimacy as well as confusion, despair, rage, frustration, longing and pain. Whether intimate, supervisory or clinical, brief or long lasting, connections with other people affect us. The Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung (1875-1961) wrote: “ The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed“. It turns out that he was right and that other people have the capacity to change our physiology and neurobiology.
Because I am a clinician as well as a teacher of psychotherapy and supervisor, I have become increasingly interested in the therapeutic relationship. What the clinician brings to the therapeutic alliance – the preamble, if you like – has traditionally been referred to in medicine as ‘bedside manner’. Effective bedside manner is important because it constitutes the first crucial step towards forming a bond with the patient. The clinician-patient bond not only facilitates communication about the presenting problem but it also regulates the neurobiology and physiology of both the patient and the clinician.
So my very talented colleague and friend, Sophie Isobel, and I wrote a paper on the neurobiology of bedside manner to help clinicians understand the impact of interpersonal information that crosses between two attuned individuals in the therapeutic encounter. The paper is available here: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1039856217726224