Question

Reflect on counseling skills that relate to rapport building, how the psychoanalytic orientation may shape how you build rapport?

Answer 1

Ans. According to ACA (2012), counselling refers to a professional relationship that empowers diverse individuals, groups and families to accomplish mental health, wellness, education and career goals.

Rapport building is an essential aspect of counselling. Counsellors should focus on the client by listening to the client's story and presenting issues. By inviting clients to focus on the reasons for seeking help is one such way in wich counsellors can initiate rapport. Also, by creating an environment full of empathy, attentiveness, caring, support on the part of the counsellor, would ensure that an effective rapport-building is done with the client.

The idea of a rapport, was formed from the psychoanalytic perspective. Sigmund Freud considered the need for the analyst to have an interest in and an understanding attitude towards the patient. And, the objective was that the healthy part of the patient would establish a positive relationship with the analyst. Further, freud defined the patient’s affection towards the therapist as a beneficial form of transference. According to him, positive transference leads to trust, acceptance, and credibility in the patient’s interpretation of the therapist. However, it was later discovered that it wasn’t transference that created this environment of trust and collaboration between the therapist and the patient.Finally, rapport was incorporated into the majority of therapeutic approaches, distancing themselves from the idea of transference suggested by psychoanalysis. So in this way psychoanalytic orientaion may have shaped the rapport-building.