Growth and Change: The Patient's Experience and the Analyst's View

THE PATIENT'S EXPERIENCE can be differentiated from the analyst's view. What is it that we are supposed to do for the patient, what is it that the patient wants us to do and what is it that we see ourselves doing for the patient? Finally, how can he test this? By and large the patient comes to us because he feels badly about life, about his life experience, and about himself. He does not know why he feels so nor how this has come to be. In other words, he's a stranger to the way in which he himself has organized his experience, his experience with significant persons throughout his life. Our goal in making this unconscious aspect conscious, in helping the patient view this somewhat more objectively, is to help him recognize first that he has organized his experiences which he often does not know. There has been organization. Secondly, we are to help him recognize how he has organized his particular experience. We refrain from telling him how he should organize his experience. I think this is often where we run into trouble. We forget that we can, at best, offer him some framework in which he can develop a multiplicity of options. As a patient he has only one option for living. The multiplicity of options really grows out of the knowledge of the possibility of