When people ask about psychoanalysis, they usually
want to know about psychoanalytic treatment. Psychoanalysis
is based on the belief that the meanings of personal
experiences often remain unacknowledged. These meanings
contribute greatly to the factors that determine
emotions and behaviour. These unconscious meanings
may give form to unhappiness as revealed in symptoms,
troubling personality traits, recurrent difficulties
in work or in love relationships, or disturbances
in mood and self-esteem. Because these forces are
unconscious, the advice of friends and family, the
reading of self-help books, or even the most determined
efforts of will, often fail to provide relief.
Psychoanalytic treatment brings the unconscious
meaning of residues of personal experience to the
fore. Psychoanalytic treatment demonstrates how
these unconscious factors affect current relationships
and patterns of behaviour. In order to help master
these influences, psychoanalysis traces them back
to their historical origins. This permits people
to see how these residues have changed and developed
over time, thereby offering the potential to deal
more constructively with their appearance in current
life.
Analysis is an intimate partnership. The bonds created
in the course of treatment create a safe environment
for self-revelation. Through exploring the bonds
of the partnership formed in treatment, not only
do people become aware of unconscious meanings,
but the bonds themselves can reveal important ways
in which difficulties can repeat themselves. The
experience with the analyst is not simply intellectual,
but is emotional and spans the range of human expressivity.
Continuity in treatment is essential to developing
the closeness and intimacy required for this form
of self-exploration. Typically, meetings with the
analyst take place four or five times a week. Patients
lie on a couch so that they can better attend to
their internal processes. They set their own pace
and their own agenda for the treatment by saying
everything that comes to mind, to the best of their
ability.
The conditions of psychoanalytic treatment create
a unique setting that allows aspects of the mind
to emerge that are inaccessible to other methods
of observation. As the patient speaks, hints of
the unconscious sources of current difficulties
gradually begin to make themselves clear through
repetitive patterns of behaviour, in the subjects
that the patient finds hard to talk about, and in
the ways the person relates to the analyst.
The analyst helps by tending to the evolution of
the therapeutic bond. This allows the analyst to
make meaningful reflections on the person's difficulties.
With these reflections, the person can refine, correct,
reject, and further modify thoughts and feelings.
During the years that an analysis takes place, the
patient wrestles with these insights, going over
them again and again with the analyst, and noting
their influence on present experience in daily life,
in fantasies, and in dreams. Through a joint effort
with the analyst, the person gradually gains mastery
over crippling life patterns, or over incapacitating
symptoms. This new-found mastery also helps to expand
the freedom to work and to love. Over the course
of time, the person's life—his or her behaviour,
relationships, and sense of self—changes in
deep and abiding ways.
The best way to discover if psychoanalysis would
benefit is to consult with a psychoanalyst. Psychoanalysis
is a highly individualized treatment that optimistically
relies on the person's innate potential for self-healing
and growth. To undergo psychoanalysis, a person
must have achieved some important satisfaction in
life, and have a sufficiently stable lifestyle to
meet the requirements of the treatment. This person
may have already achieved important satisfactions—with
friends, in marriage, in work, or through special
interests and hobbies.
Despite such achievements, someone seeking psychoanalysis
can have significant symptoms, which may include
depression or anxiety, sexual incapacities, or physical
symptoms without any demonstrable underlying physical
cause. One person might be plagued by private rituals
or compulsions or repetitive thoughts of which no
one else is aware. Another might live a constricted
life of isolation and loneliness, incapable of feeling
close to anyone. A victim of childhood sexual abuse
might suffer from an inability to trust others.
Some people come to analysis because of repeated
failures in work or in love, brought about not by
chance but by self-destructive patterns of behaviour.
Others seek analysis because their way of being
restricts choices and the opportunity for pleasures.
Some people seek psychoanalytic treatment because
other approaches have not resolved psychological
problems, or only temporarily so.
Whatever the problem, a thorough evaluation is required
to determine if psychoanalysis is properly indicated.
Sometimes, the evaluation takes place over a short
series of interviews that permit the person and
the analyst some experience of each other within
the therapeutic setting.
Psychoanalysts are physicians who have completed
a four-year residency program in psychiatry, or
psychologists or social workers who have completed
a graduate program in their fields and have had
intensive clinical experience. Outstandingly qualified
scholar-researchers, educators, and selected other
professionals may also become psychoanalysts. A
psychoanalyst is therefore a highly trained mental
health practitioner, who has withstood not only
the rigours of his or her own professional training,
but a minimum of four years of additional study
and training in psychoanalytic theory and clinical
practice. However, the designation of "psychoanalyst"
is not protected by federal or provincial law: anyone,
even an untrained person, may use the title. Graduate
psychoanalysts trained under the auspices of the
Toronto Psychoanalytic Society and Institute have
had the most rigorous education and clinical training
available for the practice of psychoanalysis, and
candidates accepted for training must meet the highest
ethical, psychological, and professional standards.
The Toronto Psychoanalytic Society and Institute
are a branch of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society
and Institute, which is a component of the International
Psychoanalytical Association, the worldwide umbrella
organization for the training of psychoanalysts
for the last hundred years. Before beginning an
analysis, one should know what the practitioner's
credentials are, and be sure that the analyst's
training in psychoanalysis meets these very high
standards.
For further information about psychoanalytic treatment,
or to inquire about referral for psychoanalysis,
contact info@torontopsychoanalysis.com
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