| When people ask about psychoanalysis,
they usually want to know about psychoanalytic
treatment. Psychoanalysis is based on the belief
that the meanings of personal experiences often
remain unacknowledged. These meanings contribute
greatly to the factors that determine emotions
and behaviour. These unconscious meanings may
give form to unhappiness as revealed in symptoms,
troubling personality traits, recurrent
difficulties in work or in love relationships, or
disturbances in mood and self-esteem. Because
these forces are unconscious, the advice of
friends and family, the reading of self-help
books, or even the most determined efforts of
will, often fail to provide relief. Psychoanalytic treatment brings the
unconscious meaning of residues of personal
experience to the fore. Psychoanalytic treatment
demonstrates how these unconscious factors affect
current relationships and patterns of behaviour.
In order to help a person master these
influences, psychoanalysis traces them back to
their historical origins. This permits a person
to see how they have changed and developed over
time, thereby offering the potential to deal more
constructively with their appearance in current
life.
Analysis is an intimate
partnership. The bonds created in the course of
treatment create a safe environment for
self-revelation. Through exploring the bonds of
the partnership formed in treatment, not only
does the person become aware of unconscious
meanings, but the bonds themselves can reveal
important ways in which difficulties can repeat
themselves. The experience with the analyst is
not simply intellectual, but is emotional and
spans the range of human expressivity.
Continuity in treatment is
essential to developing the closeness and
intimacy required for this form of
self-exploration. Typically, meetings with the
analyst take place four or five times a week. The
person lies on a couch so as to better attend to
their internal processes. The person sets their
own pace and their own agenda for the treatment
by saying everything that comes to mind, to the
best of their ability.
The conditions of
psychoanalytic treatment create a unique setting
facilitating the emergence of aspects of the mind
not accessible to other methods of observation.
As the patient speaks, hints of the unconscious
sources of current difficulties gradually begin
to make themselves clear through certain
repetitive patterns of behaviour, in the subjects
which the person finds hard to talk about, and in
the ways the person relates to the analyst.
The analyst helps by tending to
the evolution of the therapeutic bond. This
allows the analyst to make meaningful reflections
on the person's difficulties. With these
reflections, the person can refine, correct,
reject, and further modify their thoughts and
feelings. During the years that an analysis takes
place, the person wrestles with these insights,
going over them again and again with the analyst,
and noting their influence on their experience in
daily life, in fantasies, and in dreams. Through
a joint effort with the analyst, the person comes
to gain mastery over crippling life patterns, or
over incapacitating symptoms. This new found
mastery also helps to expand the freedom to work
and to love. Over the course of time, the
person's life - his or her behaviour,
relationships, sense of self - changes in deep
and abiding ways.
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