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Healing is a medical word, and in Freud's era, the world of medicine prevailed, so no one should be surprised that he took that word from medicine and brought it into his new science of psychoanalysis.
Thanks to psychoanalysis, the word “healing” gained two new meanings:
▪ Whereas healing in medicine implied the restoration of lost health, in psychoanalysis, it was not only the recovery of lost well-being-healing didn't consist merely in the reactivation of a previous state-but in the new science of psychoanalytic healing, inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety abate, giving way to “getting better” and the discovery of well-being, often for the first time.
▪ Healing in psychoanalysis also indicates a new subjective condition, gained through the process of reformed thinking and with the discovery of new potentiality. Now, the healed person surprises himself while he benefits even from his pathological experience, thus avoiding falling victim to it.
According to Freud, the ego can once more become “master of the house” after crossing a crucial intersection, at least to the extent that you “learn first to know yourself! Then you will understand why you were bound to fall ill; and perhaps, you will avoid falling ill in future” (1917/1955, p. 143). The turning point of the analytic process is to bring the patient to the border of a crossroad, from where he can distinguish the road of satisfaction and the opposite road of “pathological reactions.”
Indeed, “analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or the other” (Freud, 1923/1961, p. 50).1
It is not the enigma, the misleading crossroad of the Sphinx, in which Oedipus collapses,2 but rather the crossroad of “freedom” that is the judgment by which the patient gains access to the competent distinction between moving in a direction of well-being or acting according to pathological behavior.
Unfort