I LOVE WHAT I DO FOR A LIVING
In my 38th year of being first a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and more recently a licensed psychoanalyst I am experiencing a continuing joy about having persisted through my 35 year vocation to be able to do what I do for a living.
If I try to identify the reasons for my delight in my profession I think it has to do with the accumulated effects of a mixed bag experience as a patient, three different times, excellent training in an Institute, private supervision with a skilled and now noted psychoanaytic psychotherapist for 8 years, and practice, practice, practice.
The first two therapy attempts resulted in relative failures. With the first during college - twice a week for 4 years - ended with me feeling as though I was no better in fundamental ways than I had been on the first day of my having begun psychotherapy.
Whereas I trusted my second therapist - a Gestalt analyst one of the Fritz Perls group - the games we played seemed superficial and off point.
When I finally chose rather than backed into my Psychoanalyst - I felt instantly at home. I stayed with him and myself for 11 years, three times a week on the couch with no insurance. We saved my life.
I look back at the failures and have learned what doesn't work and how best to avoid it.
I have learned that for me the key to success with each patient is to assume there is a core issue, identify it, have it verified by the patient, and focus the thrust of the therapy around resolving the problems associated with it.
The best techniques are listening very carefully - especially for fine details - and talking. Asking good organizing questions rather than attempting to make brilliant interpretations pays high dividends.
Appreciating that the turtle won the race and that there are precious few rapid "major break throughs " - that concepts like readyness, and pacing are critically important,; that progress is incremental and more like trench warfare than quick therapeutic victories with "shock and awe" techniques; that understanding the patient in breadth and depth makes them feel as if they are in good, caring hands.
I have no difficulty answering the question of is what I do for a living a science or an art. The answer - of which I have no doubt - is that it is both. Content is important but it is proceesed through structure. That structure may or may not exist. If it does not exist then it has to be constructred.
I majored in philosophy while a confused student at Columbia University. It was largely a fall back choice - a choice that has been of immeasurable help in my work. Philosophical concepts and attitudes have allowed me to view each patient from the perspective of answering big life questions including: who AM I and what do I want? What is my self and where is it located? How to I make meaning out of the raw data (chaos) of my perceptions? What is reality (internal and external) and how to I order it?
Whereas all patients are alike in the fact that they all began as babies, they are all - of course - unique and different. Whereas there is a tendency to concentrate on what constitutues unity these days _ I think the bigger bang for the therapeutic buck is to identify differences.
I am also a relatively rigid believer in the outmoded concept of objectivity. Whereas I appreciate the fact that all reality is processed through the relative limitations of me the subjective therapist - I am equally aware that the concept of relative objecivity is critically important.
I find little benefit in the concept of co -creation. I find a great deal of beneifit in the theory and the experience of myself and my patient collaborating in understanding the nature of their individual 'psychic fingerprints" as we jointly descend and explore the contents and structures of their inner space.
Oh - I see I am aware of having lit my what excites me about my work fuse and could go on and on. The point of this free associative comment is to convey my utter delight in going to my office each work day, putting the key into my lock, walking into my 38 year old space, arranging what is there in my own special way, and always looking forward to the next adventure with my next appointment.
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