Tag: psychoanalysis

Freud Versus Jung: Different Approaches to Psychoanalysis

~ Clarissa ~ 24 Comments

As I said before, I’m not a scholar of psychoanalytical theory. I will not write complex theoretical posts because I have neither the knowledge nor the interest to do so. Given that most of the people in this country are grievously ignorant about psychoanalysis, I want to provide the most basic information my readers might find useful in their approach to the subject.

I vastly prefer the Jungian model of psychoanalysis to the Freudian for the two simple reasons I want to share with you.

1. Four and a half years ago, I was packing up my stuff at the apartment where I’d lived during my doctoral studies in preparation to moving back to Montreal. A grad student accumulates a lot of books and papers, as I’m sure you can imagine. All I did for weeks was pack books into boxes (I’m an old lady, so that was before the Kindle era.) I didn’t see the light of day for these book-filled boxes. And when I slept, I persistently dreamt of packing books into boxes, which is not surprising, given that it was all I was doing all day and every day. At that very time, I was reading Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Imagine how I felt when I discovered that dreaming of packing books into boxes meant I was feeling sexual desire for my brother.

To begin with, I don’t even have a brother. And at that moment, I was completely sexually satisfied because I had just met N., and we were living together. I analyzed and overanalyzed my every thought but, as hard as I tried, I could not convince myself that the dream I was having had anything to do with some imaginary unfulfilled sex drive and not with the very real situation I was living daily. If a box filled with books cannot sometimes simply be a box filled with books, I had no use for that theory.

Jung, bless him, changed all that. He believes that any dream analysis should start with the discussion of what has happened to the analyzand recently. To give an example, a Jungian analyst shared the following story at a Russian-speaking forum:

“One day,” he wrote, “an analyzand told me of a dream where he was persecuted by horrible monsters. I was an inexperienced analyst, so I immediately proceeded to analyze the dream. I created an entire theory of what the monsters in the client’s dream could mean. And then, I remembered to ask him what he had been doing on the day before he had that dream. “Oh, nothing special,” the analyzand responded. “Went to work, came home. Then my wife and I watched a horror movie before going to bed.” So it turned out that the monsters that persecuted this client had not come from the depths of his subconscious. They had come from the horror movie.”

The Jungian analysis of dreams never goes beyond what feels right to the analyzand. The interpretation is correct when the client feels that it makes sense to her or him.

2. Freud’s “penis envy” was his great blunder. It is also the big gun that people roll out whenever they want to ridicule psychoanalysis. I’m sure that when those people get to laying the foundations of an entire field of knowledge, they will not make a single mistake. Freud, however, was not only birlliant but also human and, hence, fallible. He really messed this one up.

Jung, however, departs from the “penis envy” model of gender entirely. His alternative theory of animus / anima has always made a lot of sense to me. When I look at my own life through the prism of this theory it makes every possible sense to me.

Projection Game

~ Clarissa ~ 59 Comments

Think of a person you know of your own gender whom you really really really dislike. Now, list the qualities this person has that bug you so much.

My most unlikeable person is:

– cold;

– distant;

– mean;

– robotic;

– overachieving;

– harsh;

– indifferent;

– garishly dressed;

– self-centered like there is no tomorrow.

Now, describe the person you dislike the most.

Do you know what we just described? Ourselves. The qualities I hate so much in my person X might or might not be ones she actually possesses. But we do know for sure (on the basis of my intense dislike of her) that I possess them. And I don’t like them in myself, which is why I project them onto her and then dissociate myself from them by saying, “God, I hate X. for being this way! And if I do, then, certainly, I’m nothing like that.”

Psychoanalysis

~ Clarissa ~ 102 Comments

Psychoanalysis has become a bad word in the US as a result of a massive negative PR campaign by pharmaceutical companies that want people to be hooked on medication and, consequently, abhor any method that can help people get better (actually, get amazingly, ecstatically well) drug-free. I’m not talking only about psychotropic medication, of course. I’m talking about all forms of physical and psychological ailments that most people address with drugs.

This is why I’m very happy to see that psychoanalysis is finally getting out of the dungeon where it had been driven by the pharmaceutical companies and becoming more mainstream.

Feministe, for example, has just started a series of guest posts by a psychoanalist who has the following to say:

We can, like the psychoanalysts, understand madness as an experience of personal history, with symptoms being the expressions of things otherwise incommunicable. Each of these understandings come with values and dictate very different forms of treatment.

Personally, I stand with psychoanalysis. My own view of symptoms is that they are a complicated interaction between the things someone had to do to survive trauma, the ways they have found to communicate these experiences which are not readily spoken, and the taboos which rob patients of their voice. Because of this, I don’t really treat symptoms. I avoid telling patients to stop doing this or start doing that and engage with the symptoms as if they were a part of the conversation in the same way that body language or metaphor might be worth observing.

Great job, Feministe!

I can only discuss psychoanalysis as an analysand, so my perspective is obviously much less useful than that of Feministe’s guest speaker. I just want to mention the following things in order to help clarify some misconceptions about psychoanalysis:

1. A psychoanalyst does not diagnose or tell people what to do. The very concept of a diagnosis is alien to psychoanalysis. Many people say that they are afraid to go to a psychoanalyst because they don’t want to be assigned a bunch of diagnoses. This is ridiculous because a psychoanalyst is pretty much the only kind of a specialist who will not do anything of the kind.

And if you fear that the analyst will tell you something like “you suffer from a heightened degree of immaturity due to the fact that your parents were overprotective and you are in love with your father”, then get over that silly myth already. In analysis, you will claw the walls and hang from the chandelier, begging the analyst to tell you what to think, but the son of a gun never will. Because answers only work if you arrive at them on your own.

2. Bluntly put, a psychotherapist charges you to tell you what you want to hear, while a psychoanalyst charges you for getting you to say what you don’t want to hear. People go to therapists for years and decades because all a therapist does is make you feel good by temporarily relieving your anxieties. Until you need the next fix.

3. If you want regular psychological support that involves no major transformation of your personality, go to a therapist. If you want to work like a dog, sweat and cry but achieve dramatic breakthroughs, go to an analyst.

4. As the analyst I quoted says, a symptom (of any illness, not just mental disease) is a way that your body has to communicate that something wrong is happening. You can dismiss this signal by getting rid of the symptom by taking medication, which, of course, does nothing to remove the original problem. Or you can work with an analyst to remove the underlying cause.

5. Yes, it really works.

Why Are Some People So Fixated on Sarah Palin’s Pregnancy?

~ Clarissa ~ 22 Comments

There is a really fun discussion going on in my Stupidometer post between Brad Scharlott, the person who is planning to publish yet another boring book that will obsessively analyze Sarah Palin’s most recent pregnancy, and your favorite blogger. For those who are interested in why some people have this decidedly unhealthy obsession with Sarah Palin’s reproductive apparatus, let me explain how this works.

Between the ages of 2 and 3, a child goes through what is known as the Oedipal stage of development. This is a moment when the child begins to formulate his or her gender identification and figure out his or her place within the relationship between his or her parents. If any sort of trauma accompanies this stage of development, the child will remain fixated on this stage and will keep replaying the “Mommy, Daddy, and I” drama over and over again.

People who never managed to pass successfully through this stage of development are the same folks who always end up being part of love triangles. Have you ever met a woman who always seems to fall for married men? That’s where her issues come from. At the same time, such people also see figures as authority as their absent Mommy and Daddy. They endlessly rummage in the personal lives of politicians, movie stars, etc. because this allows them to relive their Oedipal crisis over and over again. Have you ever met a man who seems obsessed with when Sarah Palin’s water broke?  He is simply manifesting his profound desire to stick his head under his Mommy’s skirt. The same individuals who promote the insane Babygate stories are also hugely interested in whether Sarah Palin and her husband will get married or divorced and whether there has been cheating in their marriage. They seem to hate Todd Palin even more than they do Sarah Palin, which fits perfectly with a textbook description of the Oedipal fixation.

This is why we need to be very attentive to our children in the crucial years of their development (between birth and 3 years of age.) People who don’t manage to pass successfully through any of the developmental stages will relive the trauma for the rest of their lives. And then you will see those sad middle-aged folks dedicating their existences to endless discussions of politicians’ uteri.