Die Perspektive des Patienten mitdenken: Die Rolle der Überraschung in der psychoanalytischen Technik

Title: Working within the patient’s perspective: The role of surprise in psychoanalytic technique

While in training, the author had the impression that interpretations of deep, unconscious content, unknown to the patient, and that would surprise him, was the only mutative interpretation. However, his attempt to work in this way most often lead to therapeutic impasses. Following Freud’s structural model led to a different approach, where the unconscious resistances of the ego needed to be worked through as a means of reaching unconscious fantasies in a way that recognized the dangers patients experienced when facing unmetabolized unconscious fantasies and feelings. Although Freud’s (1923b) The Ego and the Id laid the framework for working through unconscious resistances to approach unconscious fantasies more safely, Freud remained ambivalent towards this approach throughout his writings (Busch, 1992; Gray, 1982; Paniagua, 2001). It was the work of these latter authors who described a way of working through unconscious resistances and later an entire approach that focused on the role of the ego in psychoanalytic technique.

The full text is available in German.