Short-Term Hospitalization: an Aspect of the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Character Disturbance

Brief psychiatric hospitalization of borderline patients is often necessary to avert the disintegration of therapy & the likelihood of suicide. Such hospitalization arouses intense countertransference reactions in therapists & other hospital staff members. If properly used, these reactions provide a significant opportunity to achieve change in a patient’s underlying character disturbance. The author presents a detailed case report of a patient’s 3 1/2-week hospitalization to illustrate how efforts to work through a transference-countertransference impasse prevented the premature dissolution of the patient’s outpatient psychotherapy. (30 refs.)