The importance of a handshake for a psychotherapist

The importance of a handshake for a psychotherapist

Our handshake gives more information about us other than we think, says an American study that I have recently read. Researchers from the University of Alabama assessed the handshake of 112 male and female college students based on eight characteristics: dryness, temperature, texture, strength, strength, completeness of the handle, duration and eye contact. The subjects also filled out four personality questionnaires and the results were compared. The researchers found that Hand shakes are stable and consistent over time and gender. The study comes to the conclusion that Handshake properties are related to both objective personality dimensions and the impressions that make people from each other. In particular, five hand shake properties (strength, strength, duration, eye contact and completeness of the handle) were used to determine whether a hand shake was considered firm. The results confirm the widespread conviction that people whose handshake is firmer, are more extraverted and more keen to experience and less neurotic and shy than people with a less firm or limp hands, and this information about a person is transmitted to others when shaking hands.

The participants in touch Papers: Dialogues On touch in psychoanalytic space (Galton, 2006) discuss the meaning and the importance of many aspects of physical contact in the Psychotherapy consulting space. Several authors examine what it means for a psychoanalyst or psychotherapist to shake hands with a client or not to give his hand. They comment that in the psychoanalytic community in the United Kingdom there is a general reluctance to give patients hand, except sometimes at the beginning and at the end of the treatment. Many British psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists consider shaking hands with a patient as physical contact who should be avoided or limited to a minimum because he disturbs the transmission relationship. We may also like to consider whether a client (or therapist) can be awakened by the physical contact of a handshake. As Brett Kahr reminds us Touch Papers Every physical interaction between two people can trigger unconscious memories of previous physical interactions, especially those that are provocative or abusive.

A handbeat at the end of a psychotherapy session can also be a sign of an improved ability to relationship with others. When I recently told a psychotherapist that I was writing this article about hand shakes in the consulting room, she told me about a client with whom she has been working for several years. At the beginning of the treatment, her patient had been inpatient for 18 months and could hardly speak. Until recently, they have never shook their hands when the patient shook my colleague's hand at the end of the last meeting before the summer break. This act was understood by both as an expression of the patient's ability to combine with others and with himself. In contrast to many parts of Europe and South America, in contrast to many parts of Europe and South America, in which it is common at every meeting, it is unusual after the first meeting in everyday life in Great Britain and North America. Two of the participants in touch Papers Although they have been living and working in Great Britain for many years, they originally came from other countries and cultures in which shaking hands is also carried out more often in psychoanalytic circles.

Maria Emilia Pozzi, born in Italy, writes in touch Papers that her first psychoanalyst in Switzerland shook her hand for several years at the beginning and at the end of each session. It was a shock when she met her first analyst in London, who did not shook her hand until the last session, when she herself summarized her courage and initiated a handshake that she remembered when she felt a bit of laying a reaction.

The psychoanalyst Ah Brafman, who came to Great Britain from Brazil, writes that he is amused to read discussions that contain shaking hands as an example of touching the patient. He remembers his own surprise in his first meetings with his analyst in London when his hand beats led to interpretations about the unconscious transmission meaning of such behavior. Even now, many years later, he is not convinced that he has expressed a certain unconscious need through his wish to give his hand.

Another employee, the respected psychoanalyst Pearl King, who is now in the eighties, writes that at the first meeting, she always gives the patient an inviting handshake because she considers it important to work from a culturally accepted base line. The only time she shakes her hand is after the last session before a long break. It is a firm handshake that gives the patient that she is doing well and that she will take care of herself while she and the patient are separated because she knows that her patients have to rely on the fact that she could do nothing that could endanger her being there to continue working with them if they return after the break.

The psychoanalyst Valerie Sinason writes in touch Papers from a completely different handshake when she visited an institution on the Greek island of Leros a few years ago. It describes the entering a huge, cold station that smelled of excrement and in which bare and smeared patients had crushed together on old iron beds. She went to a certain overcrowded bed, introduced herself and stretched out her hand. From the mass of human pain, a man loosened with Down syndrome and shook her hand. A year later, she met the same young man in the first group at home to learn disabled people in Athens. He opened the door when she rang and she gave her hand in an ordinary way. He was elegantly dressed and took her on a tour of the house. Then he said to her through an interpreter: "I remember you. You shaken my hand Leros."

When Handshakes really reveal as much about us as the American study concludes, shaking hands with our psychotherapy clients may reveal more about us than we wish, and thus impair the transmission relationship. On the other hand, if our customers can really learn about us through our handshake, how much more can we learn through their handshake about them?

refer to

Galton, G. (2006). Touch Papers: Dialogues on touches in psychoanalytic space . (London: Karnac).

This article was first published in karnac evaluation , issue 10

2006 Graeme Galton

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