THEORETICAL AND EXPERIENTIAL CONVERGENCE
I love my work as a psychoanalyst. I particularly like persisting over time to make objective sense out of what often initially appears to be non-sense to a new patient and myself as well. And I most particularly like to combine useful concepts into a new perspective of here-to-for cliche explanations.
Thus it was a banner day - last week - when I combined the following concepts into a new perspective having the net effect of forging a new pathway for a patient who has been struggling for decades to attain and to sustain a personal balance point.
As this article is about theory and concepts I will mention no personal details about this or other patients for whom it is intended. I only wish to say that seeing and experiencing how the concepts below logically converged opened up a frutiful unexplored pathway of both theoretical and practical understanding for both me and my patient.
The concepts which have converged are:
- Post traumatic stress syndrome
- The life instinct versus the death instinct
- A near death experience
- Regression in the service of the ego
- A fear of a having a breakdown in the present that is often a memory of an actual breakdown in the past.
- A negative therapeutic reaction - [realistic therapeutic success is initially experienced as failure.]
- The combined concepts treated as a unified complex experience for the purposes of organizing what has here to fore been experienced by this and other patients as fragmented ideas, sensations, intuitions, and feelings.
- This patient, experiencing these concepts as 'a ring of truth,' has resulted in his experiencing his usual fragmented and dissociated self as unified and cohesive for the first time in his life.
What I am attempting to outline in this brief article is that contrary to most popular opinion psychotherapy and or psychoanalysis is not simply an artful exchange of words. Effective psychotherapeutic treatment combines the quintessence of art and science by illuminating the idiosyncratic psychic "fingerprint" of each patient.
When this sometimes happens- over the course of an extended therapeutic experience - sometimes lasting as long as 1000 plus therapeutic hours - the results are experienced as near "miraculous." However both the patient and the analyst are fully aware that the felt 'miracle' is not the result of magic, or divine intervention; but, instead is the natural outcome of a collaborative struggle in making meaningful connections upon meaningful connections resulting in one's initial 'mixed up'psychological jig saw puzzle finally experienced as an integrated pattern -seamlessly joined together.
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