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 and the likelihood of suicide. Such hospitalization almost inevitably arouses intense countertransference reactions in therapists and 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.