Psychoanalysis is a science and an art.
HL: “Are you aware that sometimes you did things, you didn’t know why you did them?”
HL: So trying to understand, exploring the mind to show you what you wanted to see and what you didn’t want to see. What you wanted to know and what you didn’t. What you were afraid of knowing. You can’t bury that, it’s going to come at you one way or the other.”
NK: “You know, when you’re growing up, you develop your way of being in the world, who you are, and you learn that in your family of origin. And there’s a lot of bumps in the road there. You can end up with a lot of problems about how you expect people to behave.”
MG: “You know if they take 1000 people living in Kansas and do something and the Kansans feel happier at the end of it, that’s a good thing, but it doesn’t really tell me very much about the person walking into my office next.”
HL: “Now statistics are good for writing scientific papers for the American Journal of Psychiatry. And they’re also good for making all kinds of graphs and showing them on slides. But we deal with a real person and not a statistic.”
MG: “I don’t have an idea of what you’re going to look like at the end of this, I hear what you would like to get out of it, and you know, for your sake I hope that you leave feeling like you got what you wanted, but we also expect that what you want might kind of change. You know, or orientation to yourself might change. A person comes in, and in the course of the analysis, the sorts of things that are manifested in their life everywhere begin to become manifest in the analysis.”
HL: “And that’s indeed what good analysis brings is that we understand this individual in depth like nobody else. It’s very good to know how the brain functions, but our problems of living are not brain problems. That’s the big thing. So let’s say today we know everything about the brain that has to be known. We will not know everything about life.”
Psychoanalysts are an endangered species. Managed care medical insurance companies demand quick, time-limited solutions. Trends in psychology and behavioral science veer toward generalized application of the evidence-based, that which is measurable in double-blind controlled studies. But psychoanalysts say they not only help people in ways others can’t, but get at real truths others don’t, about the mind, specifically the unconscious, and the nature of love and sexuality. Dr. Henry Lothane encourages his patients to investigate what they do not want to see about themselves via traditional psychoanalytic methods such as free association. Navah Kaplan became an analyst after years as a psychologist when she felt non-analytic methods weren’t working well enough for her. Michael Garfinkle explains how the process works, via transference, the building of an attachment between patient and therapist. Through the transference, Garfinkle says, patients enact their interpersonal patterns. When the analyst helps the patient to recognize them, there is room for change.
