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>>Let's talk about psychoanalytic therapy. This is a foundational theory and even though many of you in
your settings will not be practicing psychoanalytic techniques, I think many of you will be influenced by
psychoanalytic concepts, or you can be at least. Let me take a few concepts from psychoanalytic that I
think are particularly relevant that I hope you would give some thinking to. First is the role of the past.
While I don't think it's helpful that we get lost in the past, I think we at least want to recognize that the
client has a past and that past is affecting the client's here and now interactions with you as a counselor.
That I think is a valid point. And how much you attend to the past has to do with your theory. Some
therapies you'll hear give very little acknowledgement to the past and say, "We're not going to address
that; everything is in the present or in the future." Now in psychoanalytic we're not so concerned with
just looking at the past and exploring it, but seeing the linkage between past events and current
behavior, particularly current problems so that's a critical linkage there. And if we pay attention, many
of the current versions, the contemporary versions of psychoanalytic therapy talk about the here and
now of the counseling relationship as providing clues to what might be unfinished for a client.
Psychoanalytic basically says we have an unconscious and that many of our motives lie outside the
realm of conscious awareness so this therapy usually is a little bit...you know it entails time to surface
unconscious motivation. Resistance; I think the psychoanalytic model provides a very useful framework
for understanding what resistance is. Here it can be defined as anything that interferes with a process of
analytic work, particularly making the unconscious conscious or meaningfully exploring client material.
And I hope you will never look at resistance as something that is bad or something that we have to get
over. Maybe looking at resistance as a natural phenomenon and resistance is something that is useful
actually. Change is not automatic and change is never easy. There's a part of us that would like to stay as
we are; a big part of us would like to stay, you know, without anxiety. Change entails a certain amount
of anxiety so respect resistance. And I think this model says try to respect the client's level of readiness
to talk about hesitation and not view resistance as lack of cooperation. So what we want to do in
psychoanalytic is call to the therapist the client's attention when there are hesitations, when there are
certain factors that the client is holding back from. Introducing certain topics and saying, "You know I'm
noticing that you're very hesitant; when we get to areas that are emotionally laden, you want to shift
the focus. Could we talk about what that's about?" That's honoring resistance, respecting resistance, but
also saying to the client, "I hope we can talk about some of the very things you'd rather not talk about."
There are two other pieces in psychoanalytic that I think are very crucial and one is transference. That's
roughly defined as the client projecting on to us as therapists earlier issues as though you know, like we
may become their father or another mother or significant person in their lives. And sometimes we might
get more than we've earned from our clients because of the transference relationship. Rather than
viewing this as problematic, I would hope you would see this as really being clues to something that can
be explored. In analytic therapy, what we're seeing with transference is a reenactment of the client's
earlier experiences in the here and now and we want to welcome that and work with it. So if a client
brings in material and says, "I'm worried that you don't like me or you don't approve of me or that I'm
not a good enough client for you," rather than argue with him or her, what I think we want to do is say,
"Let's explore that; let's talk about that." So transference is something in this approach that's really
welcomed and it's the very material that we use to explore. As analysts will say, "Its grist for the mill."
And there's another part to transference; its countertransference which very broadly defined is anything
on our part as therapists that gets activated in relationship to our clients. So when our clients transfer
certain reactions to us, there's another part to that. Often times we as therapists get activated and our
issues get triggered; our sensitivities and vulnerabilities get triggered. And I don't think it means that we
have to avoid or think that we have to get rid of all of that because countertransference can be an
important clue to what's going on with the client too. What's critical is that we recognize our
countertransference and that we don't get defensive and we don't try to blame a client in any sort of
way for our own reactions. Also it's important that we learn to separate out our issues from our client's
issues and that's why our personal therapy is so relevant and so essential. That working with clients
intimately will surface some of our own issues and if we aren't aware of that, then we're going to be in
problems because many times our client's issues will trigger our own personal issues. Again, coming
back to the importance of getting our own ongoing therapy at times and certainly being willing to bring
into supervision issues that are being triggered. I want to make a brief comment about brief analytic
therapy. It's sometimes called "Time-Limited Dynamic Psychotherapy." All analytic therapy is not long
term. In fact one of the advantages is the brief model that is...uses psychodynamic concepts and
constructs but has modified this approach to fit a briefer perspective. And there are a lot of newer
therapies, newer versions, more contemporary versions such as the relational model, object relational
model, and self psychology models that don't harp back to the Freudian approach and the classical
approach, but it's more based on psychoanalytic concepts but adopting and rethinking analytic work. So
the relational model says that...gives the therapist a lot more opportunity and freedom to self-disclose
even. And in the old model, the classical model, that's something that the analytic therapist would never
do. A blank screen was for the classical model, the Freudian model, whereas in the relational approach
the idea here is that therapy is an engagement between both the therapist and the client and what's
going on between the therapist and client is essential to pay attention to and to work within the
therapeutic hour. So realize that psychodynamic therapy is ongoing and it's not something that's a
finished model. This is evolutionary and there are newer versions that are happening.