Re-questioning the Psychoanalytic Method

Abstract

This project intends to reflect upon our practice; one that values the psychoanalytical method without implying that the necessary variations in the clinical encounter with each patient are unknown. Based on Freud’s theory, related to the treatment of neurosis and its methodological prescriptions, it is considered that the extension to the psychoanalytical areas will imply appealing to modifications on both focus and interpretative style. These changes don’t –to my understanding- imply denaturalization but on the contrary maintain the core hypothesis. There is a description of the theoretical psychoanalytical instruments that have allowed me to think about treatments for patients that exceed neurosis, or for the particularly regressive moments of neurotic patients. Along with that, two clinical situations are described, explain and exemplify the different modifications in focus. The core aspects of Freud’s method are briefly gone over. As is demanded for every structural change, the analyst’s positioning is particularly valued in an area of strong libidinal commitment, but the need for the third space is always given its corresponding importance; always favoring the processes of historization and liaison in the emergence of acting and the presence of splitting, as well as the resymbolization of the symptoms and what has coagulated in its formation. If psychoanalysis deals with human subjectivity, it is in that subjective encounter that means of intervention must be established, as well as different forms of focusing and interpreting transference. All of this is possible if – and only if- we can account for our theoretical conception and a method that must be permanently tested and reelaborated.