How Can Talk Change Anything?

By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.

A client once asked me ‘How can talking change anything? I mean, it’s only words isn’t it?’ I remember being a little knocked back by the question. It was a bit like asking a baker why he uses flour to make bread. It was so obvious it took me by surprise.
Or maybe it was because behind the question I could sense that this particular client had reservations about being in therapy in the first place, which turned out to be the case. But even so, they had posed an interesting and challenging question. Can talking make a difference? I’ve thought about it a lot since it came up.
If I could replay the situation I’d probably say something like ‘words are the only things we have to change our ideas about ourselves’. That might sound a little pompous or profound but it’s not meant to be. Words are the carriers of our thoughts, our feelings, our wishes, passions, dreams, ambitions, fears. They are the things that allow us illuminate what would otherwise be a very dark world, a kind of darkness in which very little of what we humans need to survive would be available to us. I’m thinking of comfort, hope, understanding, community, inner strength, and certainly love.
Sometimes words even shape who we become in life. Consider comments that significant people have made to you at formative times in your life, using words that have stayed with you for a long, long time. For good or bad, words linger and become part of our mental landscape so that they are as much a part of our personalities as our accent or our laughter or our turn of phrase.
We sometimes take for granted in our noisy world of multi-media outpourings how potent language can be. We also overlook the fact that we are in a sense forged by words; first by the words of our parents when we are helpless infants and later by our own choice of speech and language. The very way we structure an idea that we communicate in words indicates how we feel about it.
That’s why psychoanalytic psychotherapy focuses on words. It is a talking cure. It is the job of the analyst to listen in a way that most other people in your life don’t listen. And because words are so rich with meaning it is possible to tell the same story many times to an analyst and each time it comes out slightly different so that something new is revealed.
Because of this richness the analyst, unlike a friend or family member, never gets tired listening to your story and is always concentrating on the key words that signify what might be going on for you behind the depression or the anxiety or the sexual inhibitions or whatever it happens to be. And these are the things that are explored and questioned and interpreted: words. The business of listening is not magic or mysticism; it is a science that is taught and an art that is learned. For the fifty minutes that you are in session, it is about you and only you and the words with which you choose to tell your story.