Psychoanalysis
What is psychoanalysis? When people ask what psychoanalysis is, they usually want to know about treatment. As a therapy, psychoanalysis is based on the observation that individuals are often unaware of many of the factors that determine their emotions and behavior. These unconscious factors may create unhappiness, sometimes in the form of recognizable symptoms and at other times as troubling personality traits, 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 demonstrates how these unconscious factors affect current relationships and patterns of behavior, traces them back to their historical origins, shows how they have changed and developed over time, and helps the individual to deal better with the realities of adult life.
Analysis is an intimate partnership, in the course of which the patient becomes aware of the underlying sources of his or her difficulties not simply intellectually, but emotionally -- by re-experiencing them with the analyst. Typically, the patient comes two to four times a week, lies on a couch, though not always, and attempts to say everything that comes to mind. These conditions create the analytic setting that permits 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 appear -- in certain repetitive patterns of behavior, in the subjects that the patient finds hard to talk about, in the ways the patient relates to the analyst, and so on. Patient and analyst join in efforts not only to modify crippling life patterns and remove incapacitating symptoms, but also to expand the freedom to work and to love. The goal is that eventually, the patient's life -- his or her behavior, relationships, sense of self -- changes in deep and abiding ways.
Who can benefit from psychoanalysis?
The person best able to undergo psychoanalysis is someone who, no matter how incapacitated at the time, is basically, or potentially, a sturdy individual. This person may have already achieved important satisfactions -- with friends, in marriage, in work, or through special interests and hobbies -- but is nonetheless significantly impaired by long-standing symptoms: depression or anxiety, sexual incapacities, or physical symptoms without any demonstrable underlying physical cause. One person may be plagued by private rituals or compulsions or repetitive thoughts of which no one else is aware. Another may live a constricted life of isolation and loneliness, incapable of feeling close to anyone. A victim of childhood sexual abuse might suffer from an inability to trust others. Some people come to analysis because of repeated failures in work or in love, brought about not by chance but by self-destructive patterns of behavior. Others need analysis because the way they are -- their character -- substantially limits their choices and their pleasures. And still others seek analysis definitively to resolve psychological problems that were only temporarily or partially resolved by other approaches. (American Psychoanalytic Association)
