Modern Psychoanalytic Nibbles

 

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Modern Psychoanalytic Nibbles

During my nine years full-time teaching at Nyack College's Alliance Graduate School of Counseling, students have asked me to put down on paper my quick explanations of Modern Psychoanalytic concepts and terminologies. So, I'll be blogging them as they come to mind. Hope you'll enjoy them and find them helpful in your mental health practice.

 

Conscious, Subconscious and the Unconscious

Our Conscious is where our thinking, logic, rationale and belief reside. This is where we are aware of what is being said to us and where we process our experiences.

 

The Subconscious is similar to the feelings we have when we first wake up from a dream…we wonder if what we just experienced was real or was it a dream? We are sort of aware of the feelings, it’s at the “tip of our tongue,” but we can't quite put our finger on it.

 

The Unconscious is the seat of our feelings, emotions, unresolved issues, coping mechanism and resistances. We are not aware of the feelings, "emotional motivations" we possess. We tend to "see" ourselves go into action, and wonder why we do what we do. This is also where our unconscious habits are formed and reside (versus the habits we intentionally develop).

Goal of Therapy: Becoming Aware of Our Unconscious Through the Resolution of Resistance:

One of the goals in therapy is to help bring to the conscious, our unconscious. We can accomplish this by helping the patient to talk "without an agenda" in therapy sessions. Since our unconscious is the seat of our resistances and unresolved issues, it is very keen on not allowing our conscious to become aware of what it is up to. Also, our resistance is the “Gate Keeper” of our coping mechanisms. Since our coping mechanisms worked to help us survive in the past, our unconscious likes to stick with what’s “familiar” and not change/give up the coping mechanisms. It usually believes: “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.” The sad truth is that what helped us to cope in the past, a lot of the times, can become detrimental to our present life circumstance.

Thus, the unconscious needs to be "coaxed" into coming up to the surface (the conscious) through attentive listening, unconditional regard and acceptance by the therapist.  We accomplish this through the process of Joining the resistance. Once the unconscious feels safe (when it is not being told that it has to change) we can then "make conscious the unconscious" and start to resolve our resistances and better understand our Core Beliefs.

Once we understand our Core Beliefs, we can then choose to think and view things differently, thus enabling us to be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:2).

Core Belief

During the first two years of our life - before we have words to help us form concepts - our unconscious has been recording what is happening to us and "informs" us of what we can expect from our life.

Some parents believe in letting the infant to cry herself to sleep. While this is good concept to help the child to regulate herself, many times this is done too early in the child's development (it'd be good to start sleep training the infant at six months of age - NOT before then) and gives the child the idea that the world will not respond to her needs.

 
The well-meaning parent's heart is breaking, hearing his child crying, but believing that he is doing the "right" thing to sleep train his child. However, the infant has no concept of time. So the five minutes of crying that the parent institutes in this sleep training, feels like eternity to her. The infant feels she has no voice, helpless and powerless. She then believes that her needs will not be met and unconsciously lives her life in such a way where she would repeat and reaffirm this belief to herself. 

 


For Example: I worked with a woman who lived 10 years  at Stage Four (the last stage) of cancer. Her Core Belief was that she was abandoned and no one would attend to her needs. She therefore fought off being hospitalized, as she feared being alone and abandoned in the hospital where no one would come visit her. During the last two months of her life, I called to check on her while she was in the hospital. Each time I called her and asked her about her life in the hospital, she lamented to me that no one was visiting her and she was abandoned and alone - even though she reported that her daughter was bringing food to her daily. Over the phone, I also heard her aggressively dismissing her visitors. So, her Core Belief of abandonment "over-rode" the reality of people being there for her.

 

Pseudo-Independence

The signs of a Pseudo-Independent person are when a person is always there to give to others and to help whenever others have needs, and is unable to receive/accept help or nurturance for herself. This comes from when an infant experiences life as unresponsive to her needs (as stated in Core Belief above), she unconsciously “decides” that she can cry and not be heard and be deprived, feel powerless and helpless. Or, she could stop crying and take care of herself. Her unconscious “chooses” the former, so she doesn’t have to feel powerless. When others try to nurture her, she rejects the nurturance due to her desire to not get in touch with the sense of deprivation, powerlessness and helplessness she experienced as an infant.

Treatment Option:

To help a Pseudo-Independent person to receive nurturance, we need to give to her a little morsel at a time, to help her get acclimated to the feeding. This is because her unconscious would quickly reject too much feeding too quickly in order to stave off overwhelming feeling of deprivation that she experienced as an infant - when she really was helpless and powerless.