At Best Psychotherapy is a Dialogue With the Self, Not a Discussion of Relationships
The vast majority of psychotherapy is a discussion of the client-person’s relationships. There are most likely also references to the client’s inter-psychic history. But these memories of emotional experience in their families of origin are expressed as a background and precedence for what’s taking place in their current adult relationships.
As a result such historical references are almost always very intellectual, only indirectly emotional in character. This means that the conjunction of ancient history and current events is viewed primarily from the mind’s eye, not the heart, suggesting, for instance, that the patient is treating their wife the way their father treated them. Many of us know this kind of rational remark is just a cliche that doesn’t accomplish very much, if anything. In fact it’s what makes most psychotherapy ineffective.
The alternative to this kind of therapeutic process is those few pockets of psychotherapy in which the therapist treats what’s happening as an internal dialogue within their client, the therapist being a witness and interpreter of that intra-psychic exchange. The most famous of these strategies is of course psychoanalysis, though it is not, by far, the only professional group working in ways that most consider classical.
The term, classical, refers most fundamentally to a belief in the unconscious. Many of us sort of believe in it, but not seriously – more often as a source of jokes. Without a doubt most of us don’t take it as seriously as these psychotherapists do. They regard all symptomatic formations as deriving from traumatic experience, sometimes with help from genetic vulnerabilities. Genetic proclivities are most often treated as the only cause, a very fallacious notion that seriously underestimates the human psyche by treating it only as only a victim, not also as an actor and co-creator in the formation of psychic dysfunction. The medical model seeks to obscure psychic symptoms by medicating them, instead of treating by understanding conditions that are to be found in the client’s emotional experience.
These minority psychotherapists have changed the old meaning of unconscious. It’s no longer that the unconscious is so deep and inaccessible as Freud implied. Instead what’s taking place is that information of a traumatic nature has been forced to bury itself where even the symptomatic person can never find it – that is without skilled assistance. Why? Because this information is very dangerous to know, particularly in the mind of a small child who is still alive within an adult person – who believes anything, most particularly an idea – can magically kill people, and even destroy whole worlds. The fact that this person has grown into adulthood doesn’t change the secret, buried inaccessible-to-awareness aspects of that still hidden information – i.e. that mother is a dangerous person who might poke my eyes out if I don’t stop seeing her meanness, and learn to pretend that it’s not real, that she’s just wonderful.
Such buried key information that defies what good sense would perceive, holds conflict within a psyche. That’s what creates symptoms… that parts of the psyche are operating against other parts, keeping secret what the mind needs to know in order to heal. These symptoms never stop crying out to be changed. The human psyche seeks the healing revelations of truth above all else. The fairy tale is actually true. Truth will set us free. A suffering psyche – which may include all of us more or less – will constantly seek emotional experience that might free it from the demon’s lair – in any available relationship, marriage, friendship, even strangers… or psychotherapy. Most marriages threaten to crumble when this unconscious re-enactment of trauma challenges it’s ability to cope, hoping to reverse the traumatic past in which the symptomatic person is still unconsciously trapped.
Very good psychotherapy treats a client’s symptoms as if that sought-after liberation is what’s happening, no matter what their client talks about… including their social intimate relationships. For the most part these therapists don’t respond in kind. They look for what is always a disguised manifestation of conflict within their client’s relationships – including the one with the therapist that’s called “transference” – and interpret that emotional event as a dilemma their client is having with themselves. They want, for instance, desperately to be loved, but cannot allow it to happen because of their cynical attitudes about love, their fear of trusting anyone. Such mistrust is not usually what popular fiction insists, because someone has abused them. This may be true. But the mistrust is often tenaciously persistent in order to prevent this suffering person from even trying to change it. They fear discovering the conflict, exposing wounds – in effect attacking loved ones, destroying relationships.
So if you’re serious about really changing your life, then find a psychotherapist who works in this way. It doesn’t have to be a psychoanalyst. The professional group called “Control/Master” also works in this way, as do others.
The simple truth of the matter is that we can’t change the world, including loved ones, no matter how much we try, sometimes violently. We can only change our self – an advent that is seriously underestimated. What seemed dreadfully impossible before such change in perspective now appears quite doable.
My additional works can be seen at this website: http://donfenn.com.