What is therapy?

Therapy is a professional, intimate, dedicated, and explorative relationship between two people who are agreeing to come together to approach a patient’s experience of life and living. This exploration involves the subjective experience of interacting with oneself and the world.

Additionally, this involves the emotional and imaginative phenomena of how the patient interprets, hears, imagines/pictures, and reacts to things that happen. These subjective experiences that are all quite personal to the patient are brought into the relationship with the therapist. In this interaction, the therapeutic couple experience these phenomena; tolerating the pain of what is occurring with the aim of holding those feelings and experiences as important dynamics of how the patient continues to experience others and the world.

“It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found” – Winnicott

How does Psychoanalytic therapy help?

Psychoanalytic therapy is a deepening realm of therapy initiated by Freud in the late 1800’s. As time and experience has continued, the shape of psychoanalysis/psychoanalytic therapy has changed, deepened, and grown immensely. Psychoanalytic therapy is used as a way of framing what is happening subjectively, phenomenologically, psychically within the consulting room. This includes (but is not limited to) object relating, dream analysis, epistemological/ontological meaning, defenses, anxieties, behavioral/emotional expression of complex psychical experiences (personality disorders, for example), projection/introjection and identification. These are all phenomena that exist/occur within/between every person.

Psychoanalytic therapy can help by not only identifying these subjective experiences in the patient, but also holding those experiences enough so that care, love, and tolerance of those experiences might allow something different to happen. Another way of thinking about this is that we all are in need of emotional/psychic nutrients to digest and process our feelings. Sometimes, we really need others in that process as we cannot get those needs met elsewhere. The tricky thing about our emotions and feelings is that they take time. A person can be in desperate need of emotional support and to be heard, and at the same time fear speaking up from some unexplained experience they are still suffering. More often than not, this takes time to work through and uncover; as it is a mystery to both the patient and the therapist. While all of this is occurring, the patient and therapist are not only developing the relationship of how to rely on others, but also what responsibilities are as a person. It is tricky to know what responsibility means right away, as it is a frightening prospect that sometimes comes with defenses and anxieties.

I believe in this work, and I believe that every good enough therapist has worked through and experienced themselves. I believe that a therapist cannot take a patient deeper than he himself has gone. In this way, the therapist has experienced his/her own growth so that they might have an opportunity to digest, work through, and hold the experience in the therapy in mind so that the therapeutic couple might have a chance to open. This work provides a life-changing yet challenging pathway of growing and nurturing one’s personal relationship with themselves.

I believe that many of the things that we suffer are multifaceted and multifactorial. In the realm I work in, the psyche has a humbling amount of power and influence. The goal then, is to explore the subjectivity and experience in the safe, containing environment provided to forge a relationship with the therapist, and more importantly, with oneself. And though the environment and relationship provided are safe – courage must be found time and time again to open to the experience of living.

“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.” – Sigmund Freud

Imagination and Art

A profound aspect that I have found to be beautiful from this work is how imagination influences what we do. How a picture forms regarding the intersubjective experience between myself and the patient can be illuminating and opening in the experience. When we are wandering in the dark, it is scary and difficult to tolerate. There is uncertainty; we don’t know and we cannot see what is happening. Additionally, stuckness can indicate not only a fear of something but also an inability to imagine. Creativity comes to us when we have worked the feelings together enough to, perhaps, picture something new. Freud called this the repetition compulsion – trying the same things over and over again. This can be tricky, as there are often more than one thing we are trying to do over and over again! Often, it is not the behavior that is the source of the problem (though it can CERTAINLY seem that way) but the experience and feeling that FUELS and leads to such a behavior.

I have, for example, found myself at times in my own stuck places in this work. I sit with the patient and attempt to experience what is happening to no avail. I reflect back on the foundations that I am aware of, and find that nothing sticks. Nothing moves. Intimacy, in my view, is often taken as a perspective of care and love that feels close, personal, subjectively positive. I found it astonishing then, when intimacy and emotional closeness feels differently. I recall consulting with my own pillars in the world only to find that I had been blind. What if the hostile, aggressive, angry relation that evoked so much feeling in the room WAS intimacy? What if intimacy looks different, to each and every person? What if intimacy is as much a positive relating experience as much as it is a negative one? In that moment, my mind opened to something new: intimacy/love can be experienced as hostile and invasive; met with defenses.

This brings about the second aspect: art.

Therapy is more art than it is a science. I think that there are as many ways to conduct this work as there are people in the profession. Though we have generalizable terms and words to describe feelings and phenomena, I often find that generalizations fall flat on a personal level. One image I picture for one person may not necessarily fit for another. I believe this is what some analysts mean when “re-inventing” psychoanalysis with each patient. We must discover the patient, with the patient, as the patient is discovering. It is remarkably beautiful and frustrating.

I think what makes psychoanalytic therapy so wonderful and challenging is that it leans into the artistic. There is no way for anyone to tell a person who they are, how to feel, what to feel, to think, imagine, picture, etc. There are general tenets and pillars of experience, but how we all come to such a place is such a personal journey. I recall in my early exposure to Freud, thinking that the facets of human experience and what causes problems seemed so vague. At the time, I believed that psychology was science moreso than art. Though there are certainly scientific aspects to psychology, there is an immense amount of phenomena left out because it cannot fall into the realm of science. Art is how the artist experiences the world, through sight, sound, touch, taste, and so on. In this way, they can only convey what the experience is in the medium that they can. We as the person experiencing the art must wonder and pay attention to what is moved in us. The communication is both personal and interpersonal. Similarly, the therapist and patient must find a way to communicate together in meanings on multiple levels in the same instance. Imagination can often provide a way of communicating in words a feeling that is otherwise mysterious yet quite personally real

“It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found” – Winnicott

How does Psychoanalytic therapy help?

Psychoanalytic therapy is a deepening realm of therapy initiated by Freud in the late 1800’s. As time and experience has continued, the shape of psychoanalysis/psychoanalytic therapy has changed, deepened, and grown immensely. Psychoanalytic therapy is used as a way of framing what is happening subjectively, phenomenologically, psychically within the consulting room. This includes (but is not limited to) object relating, dream analysis, epistemological/ontological meaning, defenses, anxieties, behavioral/emotional expression of complex psychical experiences (personality disorders, for example), projection/introjection and identification. These are all phenomena that exist/occur within/between every person.

Psychoanalytic therapy can help by not only identifying these subjective experiences in the patient, but also holding those experiences enough so that care, love, and tolerance of those experiences might allow something different to happen. Another way of thinking about this is that we all are in need of emotional/psychic nutrients to digest and process our feelings. Sometimes, we really need others in that process as we cannot get those needs met elsewhere. The tricky thing about our emotions and feelings is that they take time. A person can be in desperate need of emotional support and to be heard, and at the same time fear speaking up from some unexplained experience they are still suffering. More often than not, this takes time to work through and uncover; as it is a mystery to both the patient and the therapist. While all of this is occurring, the patient and therapist are not only developing the relationship of how to rely on others, but also what responsibilities are as a person. It is tricky to know what responsibility means right away, as it is a frightening prospect that sometimes comes with defenses and anxieties.

I believe in this work, and I believe that every good enough therapist has worked through and experienced themselves. I believe that a therapist cannot take a patient deeper than he himself has gone. In this way, the therapist has experienced his/her own growth so that they might have an opportunity to digest, work through, and hold the experience in the therapy in mind so that the therapeutic couple might have a chance to open. This work provides a life-changing yet challenging pathway of growing and nurturing one’s personal relationship with themselves.

I believe that many of the things that we suffer are multifaceted and multifactorial. In the realm I work in, the psyche has a humbling amount of power and influence. The goal then, is to explore the subjectivity and experience in the safe, containing environment provided to forge a relationship with the therapist, and more importantly, with oneself. And though the environment and relationship provided are safe – courage must be found time and time again to open to the experience of living.

“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.” – Sigmund Freud

Nature’s Mirror: The Therapeutic Pack