Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street": The Vicissitudes of Treating a Difficult Patient

Jerome S Gans; Robert W Ferrell

doi:10.1521/pdps.2023.51.2.147

Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street": The Vicissitudes of Treating a Difficult Patient

Psychodyn Psychiatry. 2023 Jun;51(2):147-151. doi: 10.1521/pdps.2023.51.2.147.

Authors

Jerome S Gans¹, Robert W Ferrell²

Affiliations

¹ Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Group Psychotherapy Association and the American Psychiatric Association. Now retired, he previously worked in private practice and as Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School.
² Retired geriatric psychiatrist and consultant to the Campion Center in Weston, Massachusetts, and served on the Board of the Wellesley Council on Aging. Dr. Ferrell passed away on June 16, 2022.

PMID: 37260241
DOI: 10.1521/pdps.2023.51.2.147

Abstract

Taking the liberty of imagining the lawyer in Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" as narrator/therapist and Bartleby as patient, this article, written with the therapist/reader in mind, traces the vicissitudes of countertransference and speculates on what constitutes a "good enough" therapeutic effort.

Keywords: countertransference; difficult patients; intersubjectivity; projective identification; psychodynamic psychiatry.

MeSH terms

Countertransference
Humans
Literature, Modern*