In Psychoanalysis we appreciate that in order for insight to be useful it must penetrate the obfuscatory barriers to our understanding and perception of unpleasant reality. Freud's most important insight was recognizing that when we remain unaware of things that trouble us it is because parts of our mind actively work to keep unpleasant thoughts and feelings in the unconscious. For that reason, we meet with a high frequency, tolerate frustration, appreciate the virtue of therapeutic patience and tact, and understand the need for a long period of preparation and multiple interpretations before our patients can come to appreciate their own inner workings. Usually the insights we bring to our patients are fairly simple; for example:
Ms. L was a 27 yo graduate student when she came into treatment with complaints regarding her difficulty finding a "decent guy." She was very attractive and had no trouble attracting men who were interested in her but they all failed her in short order and all ended up being "abusive" to her. In short order it became obvious to me that she unconsciously discouraged more appropriate "nice guys" and encouraged those who were much less likely to value her and treat her well. Further, once in a relationship, Ms. L found a myriad of often inventive ways to infuriate her partner; she was the compleat victim, completely unaware of how she behaved, what she found attractive in a man, and how she had an active role in the all too predictable failure of her relationships.
For months I would find clever ways to interpret her rationalizations and defensive confusions with the goal of allowing her to see how exquisitely fine tuned her inner radar was that enabled her to find the most perfectly inappropriate man with whom to become involved. She consistently told me I was being too analytic (wasn't that what she was paying me for?) and that I had no idea what I was talking about. Obviously, M (the current man of the hour) was perfect for her; he (and I) just didn't realize it and, typical of all men, we could both be easily manipulated into taking proper care of her. After months of what felt like hitting my head against the wall, she finally gave me an opportunity to reshape the interpretations of her unconscious desire to be damaged. She came in a few minutes late and was uncharacteristically silent for some time. (Silences in therapy always feel longer to the patient than the therapist.) When she began to talk she made no mention of her unusual lateness nor of her silence. After a few minutes of bland conversation I wondered aloud if she had any thoughts about how the session started. She started to cry; in halting speech she told me that prior to the session she had been sitting in a nearby coffee shop having her lunch and found herself in a reverie involving M. In her daydream, which started off perfectly pleasantly, she imagined him taking her away to a wonderful vacation; he wined her and dined her. Yet, unbidden, her reverie took a dark turn. In her daydream he took her back to their room, began to berate her, then slapped her, and then raped her. She was horrified and horribly ashamed. She didn't want to tell me about it; she didn't want to admit she could have such fantasies. She remembered having exactly such fantasies as a young girl and hated that they had always excited her. She knew if she told me it would make her masochism real. In fact, she had known for a long time that she had these memories, these unacceptable fantasies, but had hoped she would never have to acknowledge them, even as a part of her knew she would never get better until she did.
This was a simple bit of insight. Ms. L had to acknowledged she had masochistic tendencies and fantasies before she could even begin to deal with her relationship difficulties. Note that my interpretation was merely a question that had nothing overtly to do with masochism yet the subtext was that she was in the session, coming to me for help, and not talking about something important, in effect harming herself for reasons that were unclear. The fact that we had months of preparatory interpretations without which none of this would have emerged is a reflection of the hard work involved in helping people change.
I have used this blog as a way to try to understand the behavior of large groups, ie societies, in ways analogous to how an individual's mind works. Societies keep themselves unaware of conflicted and unacceptable realities. They do this in many ways including by impeding their own perceptions, ie by interfering with their societal perceptual apparatus, the media. Reality has a habit of, eventually, asserting itself, and those assertions act as interpretive statements for the society. Barack Obama and the liberal democrats recently received an unhappy interpretation; time will tell if they are able to appreciate the interpretation and move closer to reality, ie the majority of the country does not want nor can we tolerate, what they have to offer. In the international arena, there is always room for interpretation but the most disturbed societies have the most trouble perceiving them. That is the subject for a future post.
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