An Examination of Psychoanalysis (Part 11/13)

Neo-Freudian Shifts in Free Association

Free association, the staple of orthodox Freudian analysis, has given way to what Harry Stack Sullivan and others have called "more genuine communication." Sullivan thought that free association was too often a case of patients and doctors indulging in "parallel autistic reveries." He and other heretical analysts led patients to talk about significant aspects of their lives in a more directed way.

Talking may produce insight, recognition, enlightenment, and all the other facets of awareness which analysts prize; , but it does not restore c onsciousness. To heal, t alking must lead into deeper levels of experience and memory.
I dealy, therapists should limit their directives. To speak while the patient is plunging into a non-verbal early event would be to abort the feeling. We cannot communicate verbally with a patient who is her non-verbal, pre-verbal brain. The genuine communication here is the fluid connection between the levels of consciousness within the patient and not the quality of the dialogue between patient and therapist. What is difficult in the training of primal therapists is to teach them how to ask a non-verbal question. It can be done.
What is clear in doing our therapy is that one cannot transgress levels of consciousness; the therapist must remain on the same level as the patient.

Time in Modern Analysis

One needs time to fully penetrate the depths of the unconscious. The statutory analytic hour (usually lasting only 45-50 minutes, in fact) means that the therapist is setting a limit at the outset as to how far his patients can go. With such a short time, what else can they do but restrict themselves to matters of the now? Going into the past can very easily seem like a waste of time. The way analysis treats it, it is.
The person in an analytic-style therapy may relate a current situation which unwittingly leads to a primal scene; there are tears and a welling up of feeling. What happens next is crucial. If this occurs at around 30 to 35 or 40 minutes in a 45-minute session, the analyst's response is predictably one of stepping in to seal off the emotion while encouraging the patient to organize his thoughts for tomorrow. From the Primal perspective this patient has been cut off from himself, stopped dead in his tracks, right at the point when an important primal feeling is about to occur. He is robbed of the only experience that can profoundly change him.
The painful feelings are memories that take their own time to be told in their own form. The 45-minute session suits a cerebral therapy where one feels for a few minutes and can then stop with impunity. Therapists may feel something has been achieved when they see their patients crying for a few minutes about a scene from childhood, but crying about and being in the grips of childhood is the difference between a few tears and sobs, and reliving ineffable Pain for two hours. It is the "old" tears we are after; the tears the child should have cried and never did. Baby tears are curative. Adult tears are ameliorative.
The shortening of the psychoanalytic session is bound to keep the patient hanging on. He either has to talk fast to get the feeling that he is covering the topics important to him, or he slows down and is able to deal with only a fragment of what is going on. He has a distended session. And no matter how many times a week he comes for therapy, the breaks in the flow of unconscious to conscious are determined by the clock on the wall, not by his inner time.
Imagine having to squash the feelings yet maintain a grasp of what came up, assimilate the analyst's interpretations, try to make sense of one's own thoughts sparked off by the aborted experience, all the while clinging to some tentative meaning with which to step back into the world until the next meeting. It is too much to ask. Such an approach inevitably produces a greater amount of headwork and therefore confusion. Meanwhile, having encouraged this confusion to some extent, psychoanalysis then presents itself as the means of unravelling the confusion through the medium of understanding. Thus the analyst ensures his own indispensability.
It might be argued that patients who go three, four, or even five times a week would invalidate my complaint about the distended session. Presumably, whatever was interrupted one day could be easily picked up the next day. It can't because the defense system has recovered sufficiently to prevent access. Indeed, the repressive barriers may be strengthened, because our defenses reflexively tighten their hold when Pain comes close. At the very least, patients are caught in the contradiction of allowing unconscious feelings to surface followed by a need to restrain those very feelings. A certain indeterminate cycle occurs here. The patient comes close to Pain, then is encouraged to push it back down and "think about it" until the next time.
Furthermore, I can't for the life of me figure out what the difference is between therapy three times a week or four times a week. Presumably, the four times a week goes deeper and further, which in my experience is not the case. Any analysis, even if it goes on seven days a week, will go no deeper than the defense system will allow. Unless Primal techniques are used, the therapy will remain on a superficial level, no matter how convinced the patient and therapist are that they have gone deeper. That is why many of our former patients who entered Primal Therapy after years of psychoanalysis say that in the first three weeks of our therapy they had gone deeper and learned more than in all the years of analysis.
I am convinced that the kind of material a patient dare not face until she is ready in psychoanalysis, which could be a year or two down the line, is material one can get to in two or three primal sessions. We also find out that the really deep material is nothing that can be recounted to a therapist, nothing that a therapist need dose out to a patient. It is something that neither one can recognize until the feeling is felt and is over. If the therapy is done correctly, Pain will arise in order and in integratable doses. The really deep material remains absolutely out of reach of any analyst who could not possibly guess what traumas lie deep in the neuraxis.
What also makes psychoanalysis interminable is that four times a week therapy deepens the dependence on the therapist, who is meanwhile encouraging his patient to be independent and "responsible." But in these terms, to really take full responsibility would mean to stand on one's own two feet and stop asking for constant advice. Still, patients don't really go to analysis for advice; they go for comfort, reassurance, understanding, warmth, and kindness -- and above all, a chance to talk to a "daddy" or "mommy" who will finally listen and care. The price they pay to get this is to be a bright student, offer up brilliant insights and remain forever dependent. As long as the therapist is in the driver's seat, the patient will continue to be a dependent passenger.