The Danger of Counter-Transference and Need for Patient Voice in A. M. Homes’s In a Country of Mothers (1993) and Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase (2012): “Story It”

Abstract

Abstract A. M. Homes’s In a Country of Mothers (1993) and Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase (2012) offer fictional representations of the therapeutic process. Each features a female patient who is victimized by a therapist who allows their own counter-transference to prevent the patient’s voice from emerging. Instead of healing, these transferences impose therapist-directed narratives on young women who need to tell their own stories of loss and confusion. After tracing Freud’s changing ideas on transference, this article presents literary examples of counter-transference gone awry. In a Country of Mothers features a therapist who believes her patient is the daughter she gave up for adoption and who uses her own counter-transference to propel a dangerous relationship between the two women; Dora: A Headcase offers a modern-day rewriting of Freud’s “Dora” case study by a teen who resists the counter-transference of her therapist by writing her own story. This examination of literary counter-transference problematizes the supposed neutrality of the therapist and stresses the importance of patient voice in psychotherapeutic healing.