John Downing

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Growth in regression therapy

Erik Götlind’s findings and ideas and the development of GRT are drawn from over 40 years of clinical experience from therapies or supervision of therapies with psychotic patients, and others with severe deficit pathology, including severe personality disorders or severe depressions, and also people with a basically neurotic personality structure but who nevertheless also suffer from deficit pathology. Growth in Regression Therapy (GRT) is based on the clinical finding that it is possible, in a person who suffered from early maternal deprivation, to recapitulate therapeutically the first years of life again, in a partially regressed state lasting several months, the early process phase of the GRT. During this time he or she receives, in a nurturing caring relationship, the close human contact that was originally lacking, and thus the original state of deficit is repaired or undone. Thereafter the patient continues in the growth process out of the regression. Thus GRT is a self-strengthening technique. This finding is basically in contradiction to the traditionally held psychoanalytic view. The process takes place at a very deep, almost biological level of attachment. GRT has immensely broadened the scope of our possibilities to work with these conditions psychotherapeutically. Moreover, having gone through this form of therapy initially, many of these patients are then able to tolerate intensive in-depth explorative therapy which very often would not have been possible before, due to an insufficiently strong self or ego structure, and at best achieve full healing. Thus GRT adds a qualitatively new dimension to psychotherapy, that is, it is more than just a new alternative technique among many others. In many patients it can be seen as an essential and decisive element and phase in a long term on-going psychotherapeutic process.