Why Psychoanalysis?

Suffering and Treatment

Psychoanalysis responds to something of a mystery. A mystery perhaps captured by questions such as: 'What is going on?' 'What is happening to me?' or even, ''Why is this happening to me?' At the instant when someone takes the step to address a psychoanalyst, we can say that the secret of this mystery, which lies within their own experience, is being put to work.

Suffering is not a straightforward matter for the human being. Human dignity cannot do without it, neither can love, neither can survival. So, from the outset, suffering is inextricably linked with both the precious and the necessary. The separation of the subject and this suffering cannot but be a matter both delicate and complex.

Today's culture, ever in a state of flux, produces incessant change and with it a transience of identity. As the traditional moorings of identity loosen, anxiety is unbound and the subject suffers its effects in the form of his symptom. Although transient in form, the symptom gives consistency to the subject who suffers it. So, for psychoanalysis, the symptom is an attempt at a solution and acts to bind and to localise identity and anxiety.

While scientific and technological advances in modernity have transformed our capacity to treat the ailments of the body, the mind has remained resolute in its resistance to 'being fixed' from the outside. The treatment of mental suffering is not a procedure that can be applied to the subject by someone else. It is not a matter of a doctor who will sedate us before applying a procedure, of which we are largely ignorant.

• Unlike the doctor, the analyst makes no promises of 'cure', no miracle transformation of pain into 'happiness' and, while experience demonstrates that psychoanalysis has therapeutic effects, the treatment cannot aim at these without reinforcing the symptom. Nor can the effects be predicted in content, sequence or direction.

• Unlike the doctor, in order to treat suffering, the analyst must ask the subject to forego the bliss of his/her ignorance and instead to embark on a project of engagement with his/her own knowledge.

But, hey! Not so fast! This knowledge is no simple matter either. The subject doesn't know that s/he knows. Well, perhaps, by the time s/he has decided to address an analyst, s/he has an inkling, recognising that his/her symptoms, his/her sufferings, are a sign of something but s/he doesn't know what. In order to gain access to this secret, the subject is urged to speak about what ails him/her. Treatment by psychoanalysis, then, is a treatment through speech, through conversation, a conversation of a very unusual kind, and in a very unusual setting.

The Psychoanalytic Session

The psychoanalytic session is a place where it is possible to speak about what troubles you to an 'Other', again and again, and again. In offering the session, the psychoanalyst makes an offer to listen to you, the analysand, and to allow that which is being spoken to be heard. To this end, the first rule of psychoanalysis is Free Association. The subject is invited to say the first thing that comes into your mind, no matter how trivial or strange it may seem. (Freud) This rule lifts the social obligation to 'make sense'. A lot can be done with this. It is not all but in this way the work begins.