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Psychotherapy
“Essentially,…the cure is effected by love” – Sigmund Freud
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is a living method characterized by a way of thinking about both patient and therapist that includes unconscious feelings, defenses and anxieties, developmental deficits, distortions of others and self, and internal object relations. These have a clear impact on our experience and perception of the world. A psychoanalytic approach focuses on the subjective uniqueness of each patient and each patient’s internal world, while respecting the multi-determined experience and influences to each patient’s subjectivity. Grounded in the patient’s personal experience, we approach that history in the present with careful adjustments oriented toward the future with the ongoing goals of freedom and responsibility, creating meaning, development of both healthy relationships and autonomy, enhancing emotional and sexual intimacy, strengthening the will, developing a more powerful sense of agency, and maintaining an openness to creativity. I work to feel and experience the dynamic created between you and I with a mind that considers and remains open to images and internal object relations. And though the theory and method are important, we gain the most from the experience of one another.
“The scientific approach to the phenomenon of human nature enables us to be ignorant without being frightened, and without, therefore, having to invent all sorts of weird theories to explain away our gaps in knowledge.” – D.W. Winnicott
Maybe what we really need in the fear of the unknown is each other.
“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
I have loved wolves for a large part of my life. Their beauty and ferocity, their strength alone but even more importantly as part of the pack have made them an image I return to when reflecting upon psychotherapy. Wolves have a strength and endurance about them, but they are much stronger as a pack. How else could they encounter a moose, and Live. The structure and complexity of the pack “society” is remarkable and curious. I view psychotherapy as an individual that is struggling to understand themselves in their “pack,” with the hope of growing in efforts to make their pack stronger. This requires a strength that can be difficult for us: to rely on others.
Through a phenomenological method, we experience our own internal “pack;” object representations of external relating to others. Freud called the primary object relation Transference; which is the internal parental object (Mom/Dad, both) projected unconsciously onto others in life. One such other is the therapist; who may utilize such data to experience the phenomena of the patient’s relationships. Thereby feeling the hurt, hate, and help needed in such painful places.
I have come to believe that psychotherapy is an art. There is beauty, symbolism, method, refinement, and sublimation of painful experience. We as people have been kept out or trapped in, fearing lostness or meaninglessness. We as people need much, but ask for little; deadening ourselves for fear of the pain of coming Alive. But perhaps if we entrust ourselves to another – through consistency, curiosity, warmth, and presence – we may have a chance of going into the dark and coming out Alive.
“The science of psychoanalysis has arisen through art. Art precedes science…Psychoanalysis ceases to be a living science technique when it ceases to be an art. The body of knowledge increases by increasing technical skill, not speculative cunning.” – Ella Sharpe
