Psychoanalysis — An Overview
If there is a psychoanalytic idea which occupies the centre of psychoanalytic work, a touchstone by means of which one can distinguish those working or thinking within a psychoanalytic framework, it is the idea of the dynamic unconscious, i.e., of a whole area of (usually sexual and/or aggressive) feeling and thought which is inaccessible to consciousness and, indeed, is vehemently kept out of consciousness by defensive processes.
Psychoanalysis argues that we are unable to fully understand and explain our actions because there is this radical division in our psyche that makes us ‘strangers’ to ourselves – in other words, ‘we are not masters of our own houses’.
Of course, this is a disturbing realisation. Even in the context of present-day arguments, the suggestion that people do not know themselves, are driven by forces, traumas and relational patterns beyond their consciousness or control, is a shocking idea. It is especially shocking when it is suggested that you are the person who does not know what you are doing or that you are being driven by motives that you find shameful.
Psychoanalysis by no means conceives of the unconscious as the only factor that regulates our actions. It believes that our behaviour is formed at the boundary between unconscious and conscious thought and feeling and in relation to the feelings and thoughts of others. Consciousness and unconsciousness are conceived as mutually dependent, each defining the other and our behaviour. Neither exists nor has any meaning without the other. The two coexist in a mutually defining relationship of difference and in an intersubjective connection to other people’s consciousness or unconsciousness.
Childhood experiences are essential to the work. Early relationships with significant others (parents, relatives, siblings, etc.) create relational templates which tend to be repeated in later life. Traumas and abusive behaviours create wounds and scars that often do not heal without a therapeutic intervention. However, the work does not focus on past experiences alone - it concentrates on how these early relational patterns are re-enacted in the present therapeutic encounter and co-created between the therapist and the patient.
How Do We Differ from Other Psychoanalysts?
Whereas other psychoanalysts adopt a one-person model of the therapeutic encounter (i.e., the therapist is not present in the room but is only there to observe and interpret the patient’s unconscious processes), we place enormous emphasis on the following five elements:
1– There are two people in the room equally scared of the encounter
2– The centrality of intersubjectivity in the therapeutic relationship
3– Therapy is a bi-directional process
4– Privileging the co-construction of meaning
5– Participating in and understanding the meaning of enactments
Relational psychoanalysts have adopted certain modifications of the psychoanalytic framework. The basic variation in technique concerns the role of therapist who, instead of sitting out of view, confront patients directly and focus attention on how the patient’s specific problems in living are linked to his/her patterns of relating to the therapist and how they both engage in a conscious and unconscious co-creation and enactment of these patterns.
Relational Psychoanalysts need to ‘bracket’ certain classical safety measures and acknowledge that the tools of their trade are at times not very useful when they are confronted with the patient’s experience and abject suffering. They realise that it is not possible to use one’s ‘self’ as a tool to understand how the patient feels or relates to others when one’s self is deeply influenced and constituted by the way one relates to the patient. It is also impossible to interpret the patient’s ‘internal’ world by looking at the impact on one’s own when both psychic realms are externally shaped by this unique encounter and the additional encounters with significant and not-so-significant others.
For this reason, it is important not to see oneself as someone who could stand back and create a space for reflection and contemplation uninterrupted by the noise of interpersonal interaction, who could maintain the necessary distance from the torrent of emotional manifestations so as to be able to utter the ultimate truth about the patient’s problems. On the contrary, one needs to accept that one has only a rough idea of what is going on, that the space one is trying to protect and preserve is already occupied by a mixture of one’s desire to maintain a contemplative stance and the patient’s desire to get the answers they need, that most of one’s thoughts, feelings and processes are not always accessible to oneself.
Adopting a Relational psychoanalytic perspective helps us to carve out and delimit a complex matrix of unconscious interactions that take place in the space between the therapist and the patient, the space of the ‘third’.
This is a space that neither the therapist nor the patient can singularly own, although they are both responsible for its creation. To believe that the therapist has a privileged access to it through the exploration of their internal reactions to the patient is to assert a level of authority and expertise that is artificial and counterproductive. In other words, both the therapist and the patient are equally involved and contributing to it and no-one can stand out (or up) and have a view of it from a distance or above.