The Power of Psychoanalysis

One of the fascinating things about analytic therapy is that everything goes into the hopper: your life, your feelings, your relationships, your depredations – even your accidents can be grist for therapy. This recent piece in the New York Times highlights a good example of how seemingly random accidents can bring our personal histories to the fore, and help patient and therapist alike discover meaning in something that may have seemed meaningless.

The author’s patient suffered burns over the summer, and the injury and its aftermath underscored some longstanding issues of enmeshment with the patient’s mother. On the subject of her mother’s prurient interest in the extent of these injuries, for instance, the patient reports:

“And my mother replied: ‘It’s my trauma, too. In fact, I think I’m more traumatized by it than you.’”

Sometimes the things we say illuminate far more than we intend, and psychoanalysis is a perfect forum to explore these valences. The mother’s words in this case provide a nice starting to explore what has gone wrong between these two women.

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is the only existing modality that lets us understand our lives and histories from an emotional perspective. As the writer says:

One of the things I miss most about my own analysis is the suddenness with which strange events could emerge, knocking you over backward. And toward the very end it felt as if you could time-travel, bouncing between a past and present whose surface was fabricated by an ancient mythology, the wondrous accident that was your existence.

If you’d like to explore the fundamental psychology that continues to influence your life and choices, please contact PPSC to find a therapist today.

Navigating Transference in Psychotherapy

Most of us who work in psychoanalytic psychotherapy owe a debt to Sigmund Freud, whose first steps defining the field shone a great light on the role of our unconscious minds. Freud’s body of work is not without its flaws, but his insights across a broad diversity of subjects have more or less stood the test of time. One of the issues Freud took particular interest in was the dynamic of the therapist’s office. Analytic therapists are generally discouraged from revealing too much about their personal lives, for fear of staining the therapeutic process with unwelcome details. As a recent New York Times piece described it:

In psychoanalysis, there is a specific rationale for this rule. The theory holds that patients tend to re-enact with therapists the relationships they had with their parents. This is called transference. By paying careful attention to this unfolding drama — as it plays out, right there in the office — the therapist and patient can uncover and resolve childhood conflicts. If a therapist interjects information about herself, she clouds the mirror and compromises the process.

Follow this story to its conclusion, however, and you can see how the benign neutrality of the therapist might come to be seen as a hindrance in some cases, even an act of hostility. In the case study within the piece, a patient desperately needs a sense of reciprocity, even a shallow one, in order to build the trust necessary to do the work:

As therapy continued with her, I heard how flat and tinny I sounded whenever I attempted to analyze what was going on between us. When I lapsed into too clinical a mode, our connection would wobble, and her alienation became palpable.

No two talk therapies are the same, and of course every psychoanalyst develops her own approach and rhythms. Learning and adapting is part of what makes an effective therapy worthwhile, for patient and therapist alike. If you’d like to embark on a journey to address longstanding feeling of depression, anxiety or loneliness, please contact the expert NYC therapists of PPSC today.