Working through
Working through is a term used in psychoanalysis for the integration of an interpretation.
The working through can be accompanied by the psychotherapist by showing how possible meanings can be found in different contexts. Freud described this symbolically in 1941 as follows: “If someone has lost a friend, then in all situations that remind him of the friend he must make it clear to himself anew that the friend is no longer and that he has to do without him. The image of this friend is contained in many complexes of memories and wishes as a representation, and the detachment from the friend must take place individually in each complex. "
It denotes a situation or phase in a therapeutic process in which the psychotherapist's interpretation encounters resistance . In this case the patient has to integrate the interpretation. In working through the subject, i.e. the patient, learns to accept certain repressed elements of the unconscious and to free himself from the compulsion to repeat .
Working through is an important part of long-term dynamic psychotherapy. Although the psychotherapeutic process has seemingly stalled, working through is one of the main factors of therapeutic effectiveness.
The concept of a psychoanalytic technique, coined by Sigmund Freud , is described in just ten pages in the essay Remembering, Repeating and Working Through in 1914 . If a change in the patient's life is intended, remembering a moving incident and repeating it is not enough. Freud: “One must give the patient the time to immerse himself in the resistance unknown to him, to work through it, to overcome it by, in spite of him, continuing to work according to the fundamental analytic rule . Only at this level can one find the repressed instinctual impulses in common work with the analyzed, which feed the resistance and of whose existence and power the patient is convinced through such experience. The doctor has nothing else to do than wait and allow a process that cannot be avoided or always accelerated. If he sticks to this insight, he will often save himself the illusion of having failed, when he is continuing the treatment along the right lines. Working through the resistances may in practice become an arduous task for the person being analyzed and a test of patience for the doctor. But it is that part of the work which has the greatest changing effect on the patient and which distinguishes the analytic treatment from any suggestion-influencing. Theoretically, it can be equated with reacting off the amounts of affect trapped by the repression , without which the hypnotic treatment would have no influence. "
Individual evidence
- ↑ J. Laplanche, J.-B. Pontalis (1973): The Vocabulary of Psychoanalysis. First volume. Frankfurt a. M .: suhrkamp pocket book science.
- ↑ Joseph Sandler, Christopher Dare, Alex Holder: The basic concepts of psychoanalytic therapy . Klett-Cotta, 2001, ISBN 978-3-608-94357-3 , pp. 198 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
- ^ Freud: Gesammelte Werke, B. 10, London 1991, 8th edition, 135f.