I have been putting this entry off! It’s so hard, firstly, to guage the level of information to give as some people will have trained in this arena and know so much about it while others may know little or have been told “oh that Freudian nonsense”.
Details #
For me the key issue in psychoanalytic (Psa from here on to save keystrokes!) theory is the idea that we are unconscious of some things that motivate us, things that affect how we perceive and experience things. This is not the behavioural unconscious that means I ten finger type without being conscious of which keys are where, or that I reach for the light switch in the correct place in every room in places I know well. Nor is this the “subconscious”: that of which we are not normally aware but which, with more or less conscious effort, we can pull into awareness. This is something very different and words do become a bit unweildly as they are so much more rooted in our consciousness than our “system Ucs” (Ucs is shorthand for “Unconscious”!). This “system Ucs” is all the ways in which our minds work that are kept walled off from consciousness.
To me this walling off, an active process and itself, necessarily, not accessible to consciousness that is one key element in Psa theories (of which there are many) that characterises all of them and explains the methods of practitioners being in some ways radically different from those of most non-Psa therapies. For me the other key issue is that the processes in this system Ucs are not those of our everyday conscious logics.
I find the metaphor from computing that in modern operating systems there are often layers of code that are walled off from most debugging. That’s a security feature and I find it moderately helpful in trying to explain this idea of an actively suppressed system Ucs. I also find the fact that maths and theoretical physics particularly allow, in fact, require, that there are well defined functions within their realms that transgress our everyday “Newtonian” or “Euclidean” ideas. These help me accept that the fact that the system Ucs seems to obey rather counterintuitive ways of working.
Perhaps unfortunately, many Psa theorists and therapists have avoided much change measurement and particularly self-report measures. The logic is that these can only measure the conscious. I think that’s broadly true and for me it makes using change measures in therapy, to guide the therapy, is inappropriate if working psychoanalytically. However, I think that most Psa therapists, starting with Freud’s famous idea that the outcome of a successful therapy was to work and to love, are actually happy when they see clients changing in the sorts of ways that the less “disease model” measures do measure. (There’s another whole argument that a “truly” Psa therapist/analyst tries to refrain from having any aspirations about the direction of change, and again, I have some sympathy with the logic of this, but I still don’t think it should prevent Psa therapists trying to measure change and, an even more difficult challenge, try to measure and understand their processes.)
Try also #
I really don’t think anything in the glossary, at least so far, maps to these ideas!
Chapters #
Not covered specifically in the OMbook partly because we wanted to make the book useful for people working in as many theories, practice modalities and formats as possible. Chapter 7 “Outcome measurement for individual practitioners” has an invented example of a practitioner working psychoanalytically.
Online resources #
There’s a world of material about Psa theories and therapies out there!!
Dates #
First created 21.vii.25.
