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slumberdisrupt | 2 years ago

This is a caricature of clinical psychoanalysis and is more applicable to other therapies. For example, the initial moments of CBT are "psychoeducation", where the therapist sketches out with magic markers a bunch of categories (feelings, thoughts, behaviors, emotions) and their subcategories, and the patient learns to see themselves in these ontological terms. Suggestibility is the cornerstone of these interventions.

Every psychoanalyst of course has their theoretical meta-psychology, but every clinical psychoanalyst knows that they must fight to abandon it at the door as they confront every analysand anew. Psychoanalysis is not a matter of instructing the patient of the death drive, of resistance, of the Oedipus complex, and so on. (Freud was wrong about why his intervention with Little Hans "succeeded".) Freud himself searched for something beyond hypnosis because the hypnotic technique required a susceptibility of the patient to suggestion, and furthermore required a constant relationship with the patient, otherwise the patient would invariably suffer a symptom relapse. Relate this to the dismal long-term rates of regression of CBT patients. (And this is the forbidden evidence of this "evidence based therapy".)

The analysand enters the analytical relationship supposing (as you have supposed) that the analyst knows something crucial that the analysand does not. So what happens as the analysand comes to realize that the analyst does not, in fact, possess this knowledge? The analyst indeed knows they don't know, but this is presumably nothing like what you assume the analyst supposes themselves to know.

The analyst is, in their role as an analyst (and not a therapist), merely the secretary of the analysand. They "take notes" on what the analyst says, in order to help show the analyst what they've said.

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