SEVEN PAPERS ON EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS ... - Wagner College

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somewhat as it was in early childhood. Replicating a feature of childhood in some sense parallels the controlled regression essential to classical psychoanalysis. 11. Being a blank screen is impossible in practice. At the very least, as Thomas Szasz has repeated again and again, the analyst is always seen a powerful person. At the very least, the analyst is also a man or a woman. 12. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 343-48. 13. The word 'infant' means "without speech" (from the Latin adjective infans = not having the power to speak). l4. In Syrnbolic Realization (New York: International Universities Press, 1951), Marguerite Sechehaye recounts her years-long effort with a woman diagnosed as schizophrenic, with whom Sechehaye seems to have repeatedly accomplished what I have called the reinvestiture of existence, although her involvement with the patient was also decidedly maternal. 15. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Avon, 1941). 16. By available to the analysand, I mean within the realistic options available to her. Obviously, someone who is an amputee will never dance Balanchine, even though she desires this above all else.
VI. Authenticity in Existential Analysis (2007 first published in Existential Analysis 19(1), 2008, pp. pp. 81-101. I. Diagnosis, Intervention, Treatment, Cure In its brief history the goal of psychotherapy has changed dramatically several times. When only a century ago the Viennese neurologist, Sigmund Freud, first decided to intervene with words instead of available medical procedures to treat his patients’ “neurotic” complaints, as a physician he still had in mind, first and foremost, the cure of a patient. A psychoneurosis was still, for Freud, a disease of the nervous system and a presumed lesion was responsible for its symptoms. More than a few steps, however, lay between the doctor’s small examining room and his study in the apartment on Berggasse where psychoanalysis was first practiced at the end of the nineteenth century. While it is unclear whether Freud ever ceased to see his referrals as patients (each of them an instance of the living corpse every physician is trained to envision presenting itself to him for care) his use of words rather than scalpel and drugs (forgetting for a moment his early prescription of cocaine for “depression”) marked a departure from the traditional medical model on which the physician’s approach is based. Freud wore a three-piece suit and never unbuttoned his tie in the presence of a patient. We are told he kept appropriate physical and absolute psychological distance from his patients, eventually moving entirely out of their view and the diagnostic gaze to a position seated behind the patient’s body, which was stretched out comfortably on the analytic chaise longue. Like a surgeon, his work space was set up to shield from view his patient’s face. Movement of the patient’s body away from the doctor’s examining eyes transformed the medical patient into the analysand of classic psychoanalysis. The analysand was physically there, but the data on which Freud’s treatment would be based was being gathered elsewhere, just as today the data of any primary care physician’s physical examination of a patient are collected for analysis elsewhere in laboratories where the patient’s blood and urine samples are scrutinized for interpretation by the physician. The data provided by Freud’s analysand was gathering in that immense chamber he termed the Unbewusst, a place where consciousness could never shed its light. Moving the site of his work with patients out of the hospital setting was decisive for Freud’s invention of the prototype of the patient in psychotherapy, since it located the procedure of psychoanalysis away from an environment redolent with the ambient odors of cautery, human body products, and the chemical compounds used to cleanse wounds, induce anesthesia and maintain a hygienic institutional environment. In Freud’s study, there was instead the smell of food being prepared elsewhere in the doctor’s apartment, the ubiquitous, acrid odor of cigar smoke and the musty smell of heavy Victorian fabrics and upholstery. The odors produced by the patient’s body–the sour breath exhaled by a dyspetic or the sweetness of acetone leaking out through a diabetic patient’s pores–was overwhelmed by the smells of burning tobacco, simmering sausages, and his chow’s fur. Climbing the marble stairs to Freud’s apartment, an analysand might just as well have been visiting a relative or her attorney. She was entering a consulting room, not a hospital or dispensary. Freud changed the being psychiatrists treated by changing a what to be treated to a who to be treated. Although, initially he persisted in using the language of neuropathology, Freud’s conception of a psychoneurosis was soon not that of a disorder of the nervous system and therefore a disorder of the body, but a condition of a person’s emotional dis-array, a disorder of the analysand’s psyche. Freud’s topographic model of the intrapsychic world of the patient envisioned contents of an entity, the psyche, moving from one domain to another, between the unconscious, the preconscious and the conscious. The Freudian psyche was not the brain, yet the image was one of a thing in which energy moved from place to place. The
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SEVEN PAPERS ON EXISTENTIAL ANALYSI
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psychotherapy. In 1960, Benjamin Wo
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Frankl, V. (1958). On Logotherapy a
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Ungersma, A. (1961). The Search for
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our work may parallel that of our c
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current revival of existential psyc
Page 13 and 14: Cannon. 12 James Lantz 13 has writt
Page 15 and 16: World War II, in 1951, Kuhn 47 had
Page 17 and 18: Of course, Freud never found any ev
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Page 21 and 22: few who have persevered through suc
Page 23 and 24: III. Existential Therapy on Heidegg
Page 25 and 26: and underlying presuppositions? Wha
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Page 29 and 30: Existential Pathology and Therapy L
Page 31 and 32: The therapist's existence passes un
Page 33 and 34: 15. See Part II of Heidegger's Die
Page 35 and 36: My gaze thus remains fixed on a per
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Page 39 and 40: eyes. That reflection gives me the
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Page 43 and 44: is the source of all possibilities.
Page 45 and 46: consciousness is therefore always i
Page 47 and 48: existence, that I exist, which othe
Page 49 and 50: takes its place as part of the proj
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Page 53 and 54: they do exist. Recognition, as the
Page 55 and 56: the names applied to them designate
Page 57 and 58: the death of a parent or child, bei
Page 59 and 60: Certainly, some ways of comporting
Page 61 and 62: hopelessness), extreme anxiety, or
Page 63: In contrast to these technical reco
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Page 69 and 70: a result, their feelings and behavi
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Page 73 and 74: As Erich Fromm pointed out many yea
Page 75 and 76: a role to play (“B”) while she
Page 77 and 78: Existential Therapy (New York: New
Page 79 and 80: VII. “Eros in Existential Analysi
Page 81 and 82: conditions of sex are complementary
Page 83 and 84: to be the god of “sexual desire a
Page 85 and 86: “Why not?” In this way, he bega
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SEVEN PAPERS ON EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS ... - Wagner College

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