Psychoanalysis was described by one of Sigmund Freud’s, the inventor of psychoanalysis, earliest patient, as a talking-cure.
To talk—simply as that?!
Today,
our society has become increasingly aware of the importance to work on mental health. Different psychiatric diagnoses, as you might be familiar with, such as “bipolar disorder“, “PTSD”, “personality disorder“, chronic fatigue syndrome“, have become more and more prominent in our everyday vocabulary, imposing an urgency to live one’s life orderly and normally again.
However, psychoanalysis is a practice that works through not merely the conscious surface, but also the unconscious structure of each of our own suffering. What is externally known as “disorder” is revealed through each psychoanalysis, in fact, as something that contains deeper, more meanings and significance that entail who each of us uniquely is.
The practice of psychoanalysis acknowledges also the political risks in normalizing patients as a limiting goal of psychotherapy. In that light, psychoanalysis is extremely pragmatic, because, through the analysis of unconscious symptoms, psychoanalysis gives space for each to enjoy and act upon what does not work in the life we uniquely live within.
The unconscious?
Perhaps you have heard of different psychoanalytic concepts:
- unconscious
- free-association
- dream analysis
- drive
- repression
- ego and super-ego
- transference
However, psychoanalysis is not just a doctrine of psychological theories. There are no two cases of psychoanalysis that are the same. The ethics in the practice of psychoanalysis works on a case-by-case basis, because each of our suffering, enjoyment, belief, and style are uniquely different, particularly when language comes into play.
The effects…
…of psychoanalysis is not limited to the removal of symptoms.
The analysis of the unconscious allows us to find the turning point for our weaknesses, fear, suffering, and pain into causes and possibilities for changes in life, both individually and socially.
Psychoanalysis offers each person the opportunity to transform from a passive object of pathology to an agent of each of our unique symptoms.
Psychoanalysis is effective when you are experiencing difficulties from:
- Effects of traumas (depression, anxiety, paranoia, phobia, suicidal thought, guilt, insomnia etc.)
- Psychoses (hallucinations, delusions, schizophrenia etc.)
- Migration, exile, “integration”
- Racism
- Feelings of loneliness, being excluded; fear of mission out
- Feelings or fear that your life has been a waste; in paralysis
- Feelings that you are inauthentic, or that you are incapable of doing what you want
- Narcissism of self and/or others
- Losses and grief
- Medically unknown bodily symptoms (fatigues, bodily pain etc.)
- Addictions or compulsive behavior (drug/alcohol addiction, sex addiction, eating disorder etc.)
- Gender orientations and identities / Transgender etc.
- Life transitions (career, political-orientation, religious beliefs etc.)
- Relationship or family issues (conflicts, violence, abuse etc.)
However, psychoanalysis is not limited to the removal of symptoms. Generally speaking, it allows one to uniquely enjoy living with what is essential to each of us, without imposing any judgement on what should be the essence of life.