Outwitting Our Nerves: A Primer of PsychotherapyJackson, Josephine A. (Josephine Agnes)
Science
Outwitting Our Nerves: A Primer of Psychotherapy
Jackson, Josephine A. (Josephine Agnes)
Nervous system -- Diseases; Psychoanalysis; Therapeutics, Suggestive
=Resisting the Probe.= Naturally, it is not all fair sailing. The
subconscious impulses which repressed the painful complex in the first
place still shrink from uncovering it. In many cases the resistance is
very strong. It, therefore, often happens that after a time the
patient becomes restive; he begins to criticize the doctor and to
ridicule the method. His mind goes blank and no thought will come; or
he refuses to tell what does come. The nearer the probe comes to the
sore spot, the greater the pain of the repressing impulses and the
stronger the resistance. Usually a strange thing happens; the patient,
instead of consciously remembering the forgotten experiences, begins
to relive them with his original emotions transferred on to the
doctor. Depending upon what person of his childhood he identifies with
him, the patient develops either a strong affection or an intense
antagonism to the physician, attitudes called in technical terms
positive and negative transference. If the analyst is skilful, he is
able to circumvent all the subterfuges of the resisting forces and to
uncover and modify the troublesome complexes. Sometimes this can be
accomplished at one sitting, but more often it requires long hours of
conversation. Freud has spent three years on a single difficult case,
and very frequently the analysis drags out through weeks or months.
The amount of mental material is so great, especially in a person who
is no longer young, that every analysis would probably be an
interminable affair if it were not for three valuable ways of finding
the clue and picking up the scent somewhere near the end of the trail.
The first of these clues is nothing else than so despised a phenomenon
as the patient's own night-dreams, which turn out to be not
meaningless jargon, as we have supposed, but significant utterances of
the inner man.
=The Message of the Dream.= When Freud rescued dreams from the mental
scrap-basket and learned how to piece them together so that their
message to man about himself became for the first time intelligible,
he furnished the human race with what will probably be considered its
most valuable key to the hidden mysteries of the mind. Freeing the
dream from the superstition of olden times and from the neglect of
later days, Freud was the first to discover that it is part and parcel
of man's mental life, that it has a purpose and a meaning and that the
meaning may be scientifically deciphered. It then invariably reveals
itself to be not a prophecy for the future but an interpretation of
the present and of the past, an invaluable synopsis of the drama which
is being staged within the personality of the dreamer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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