Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Escaping the Phantasy

By Kevin Murphy
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.

What is it that goes wrong for us when, say, our relationships seem to end in disaster? Or when we repeat patterns of behaviour that are not good for us? Or when our lives are plagued by a sadness that we cannot understand? Or when we simply find it impossible to be ourselves when we meet a potentially interesting partner, sometimes to the point of avoiding new prospects? When I ask this question, I suppose I am asking it in the broadest sense of ‘what is it’ that goes wrong.
I was prompted into thinking along these lines while listening to Paris-based psychoanalyst and philosopher Jean-Gerard Burzstein who was in Dublin last weekend giving a lecture on behalf of the Association for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in Ireland (APPI).
Now most therapies might start looking for answers to these questions in the actual conditions of the complaint. So if it was to do with relationships, they’d immediately start looking at the way you view relationships and so on. If it was a repeating pattern, they’d begin looking at the triggers that make that behaviour swing into action. And if it was a lifelong sadness, they’d start examining the things that made you sad. Burzstein was in Dublin to remind his audience of psychoanalytic practitioners that while psychoanalysis might begin similarly, the ‘thing’ it looks for is entirely different.
As far as he was concerned, and I concur with his views, contemporary psychoanalysis operates on the basis that what goes wrong is something of a different order. People engaging in difficult, problematic, symptomatic, negative and unproductive patterns of behaviour are, even to an outsider, easily perceived as being ‘stuck’ . In psychoanalytic terms, however, this being ‘stuck’ is elaborated even further to include the notion of being ‘trapped’.
And what is it that people are trapped in? Well, to put it simply, we become trapped in ideas we have about ourselves and the world that we inhabit. Now it is not just a case of coming up with ideas that do not serve us well and then becoming trapped by them and in them. There is, according to Bursztein, a little more to it than that.
From the very earliest age our thinking becomes conditioned by what we see around us of our close family, particularly mother and father. This in turn gives us our main set of ideas about who we are and who or what we perceive ourselves to be. This process happens incredibly early in our lives and it happens at the imaginary level, often contrary to things as they appear in real life. We are filling in with our imagination what we are still incapable of understanding fully. This helps explain why good folk can sometimes produce confused kids. Equally it helps explain why sound adults can emerge from troubled backgrounds. But it also helps explain why in an age of relative peace, of greater sexual and personal freedoms, along with great strides in science and social progress, we have increased numbers of depressions, anxieties, phobias and addictions.
According to Bursztein, each of us develops a fundamental phantasy within ourselves. This is a core notion, if you like, about what our position in the world is in relation to our primary carers, usually our parents. It works invisibly, behind the scenes, informing our actions, our choices and our ideas. It can inhibit us, prohibit us and can see us doing the same thing over and over again with no positive results. It comes into being as our way of dealing with the realisation - that each and every one of us comes to very early in our childhood - about our place as either a male or female child of male and female parents. It is, in turn, determined by the nature of the adult people who are raising us, by our adaptation to the myriad developmental changes taking place, and by our capacity to accept the necessary ups and downs of the process.
Positive people are marked by a sense of resilience. They get that from an early age. People who can enter into successful relationships have a confidence about them. They also get that from an early age. People who do not spend their lives repeating patterns of behaviour are relatively free of the need to re-find something that was lost; they have accepted loss, whatever it might be, as part of the human condition and they move on. This too is learned at an early age.
For those people who are unable to live in this way, the fundamental phantasy is at work, strongly tying them to an unyielding and unhelpful set of convictions about themselves. Psychoanalysis does not work by simply telling someone that they must change their beliefs about themselves. Bursztein made the important point last weekend that it works by using the person’s own language to trigger and unlock the old meanings.
He called this effect, ‘retroaction’. The key to psychoanalysis is retroaction, in a sense. It is not speaking for the sake of speaking. It is the release of new meaning by an effect of going back. In the same way that each sentence we utter is only possible to understand when the last word has been spoken. We understand every sentence in this retro-active way. And so too with the experiences of our lives, like half-finished sentences our experiences are made clearer to us by the act of speaking them out, of finishing them in the dynamic presence of a trained other. And where is this retro-action being directed? Towards the fundamental phantasy, first in establishing what it is and then in allowing the person step away and free themselves from it.
Sometimes this happens without the person even realising it. I have written before about people saying they have no idea how they feel better after therapy but they do. For others it does not happen because they have been unable in their speaking to allow themselves get close to the simple experiences of their lives. By that I mean simply speaking about themselves.
But the act of speaking still remains the great liberator. It is not rocket science. But it is not simple either. It involves a continuous effort to overcome our own resistances to speaking, particularly about ourselves. Yet if we manage to allow ourselves the ultimate freedom, as psychoanalysis requires, to speak about ‘everything and anything’ that comes to mind, without censorship, without editing, then we are half way there.

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