The “Outcome” of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: Conformity, Peculiarity and “Common Unhappiness”

The point is that [D. H.] Lawrence started life wholly free from any restriction of tradition or institution, that he had no guidance except the Inner Light, the most untrustworthy and deceitful guide that ever offered itself to wandering humanity….

In this article I contrast two sets of implicitly prevailing notions as to the desirable outcome of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. On one hand, these are “conformity” and “common unhappiness” and, on the other, “peculiarity.” I regard the latter as a preferable analytic development because it affirms the never to be completed evolution of a sense of distinctive individual experience or self as the sine qua non of the psychoanalytic process. While it overlaps such frequently prescribed analytic developments as ego autonomy, uniqueness, self-actualization, or individuation, the pejoratively toned term “peculiarity” (denoting “odd” or “strange”) is proposed here to emphasize the emotional cost in anxiety and guilt inevitably incurred in learning to “step to one's own drummer.”1