A patient complains of feeling extremely depressed. He doesn't know why. The therapist asks when it started. Oh, about three days ago.... Trails off. What happened three days ago? He slowly relates how he'd finished a paper several months ago, and it was recently accepted for publication. He was pleased. He spoke of it to his father, who then asked to read it. Upon finishing his father proceeded to ridicule the paper as arrogantly elitist, impossible to understand. The patient felt crushed. In the session he gradually gets angry, begins to wonder why the hell he bothers trying to please his father. He begins to feel less depressed.
In a very straightforward way the patient is not immediately aware of what weighs on him. And, most importantly, aren't we referring to some feature of the patient's psyche that renders him divided, and isn't that a state that is brought on by a conflict? Unconscious? Or, to get into a quibble that some Freud bashers love, maybe it's "dissociation"? (Joseph and Anne Marie Sandler referred to this "level" as the present unconscious.)
To fully understand how the depressed state takes shape, you would need to consider the development of his relationship with his father, how the patient has tried to maintain the relationship despite recurring difficulties of this sort. You might also need to address how the patient might have -- in a way that corresponds to the usual connotation of unconscious -- intended that his paper awe and humiliate his father, and so on. To understand the impact of therapy, you would need, I think, to understand the intervention as not only involving "showing" the patient something but also providing them with an alliance that breaks up the preoccupation with the father. Shaman? I think a shaman would be offended at the apparent trivialization of his role here, this is all too routine.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Thomas Seay" <entheogens at yahoo.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2004 5:56 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Freud
|
| --- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
| >
| > Where in the hell has it been hiding all this time?
| >
|
| Where in the hell is this ghost called the
| uncononscious? Is it inside of me or does it hover
| around with my guardian angel? I also ask Carl's
| question: what does "scientific" have to do with
| Freud? At best, it is imaginative speculation based on
| anecdotes. How many people did he study and how many
| stories were contrived in order to fit his theory?
|
| -Thomas
|
|
|
| __________________________________
| Do you Yahoo!?
| Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it!
| http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/
| ___________________________________
| http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
|
|