Notes on Changes in Analysis

IN SUCCESSFUL ANALYSIS, THE patient will discover the elements of his unconscious that interfere with his self-realization and learn to integrate them into his personality. These acquired insights should be liberating, freeing at least some of the energy bound by the protective and defensive neurotic systems. Eventually they should allow the person to see himself and his present life-situation more objectively, and help him be more responsive to the surrounding world. Little by little the general confusion and undifferentiated notions about the world and people will subside, ordered by a new understanding of the neurotic structure and its defensive patterns of behavior.

Not all of the people who enter our offices are willing to change. In fact, more commonly they want to change reality and not themselves. Real change, the result of confrontation with oneself and one's life, seems terrifying, and the ego-strength necessary to face their emotional turbulence, their nameless fears and self-doubts is often not available. So they stay prisoners of the fictitious balance they have created. The problem, however (which their discomfort signals), is that the precarious harmony is an illusion and not a genuine achievement. Its cost is the repression of all inner conflicts and feelings, which consumes energy and produces anxiety and tension. It also permanently eliminates the possibility of commitment to and involvement with the world and the Other.

Ralph, an engineer who came to see me in his early forties, is typical. His older brother, a renowned Ivy League professor, was clearly a decisive figure in his life, although Ralph only mentioned that he did not know him well. In fact, his brother had been a decisive identification figure when Ralph was a teenager, whom he had looked up to for the acceptance and guidance that could not come from a detached father and epileptic mother. However, the brother was preoccupied with his own career and tolerated Ralph only so lo