The Symbolic Attitude In Psychotherapy

The Intention In This Paper is to study some aspects of psychotherapy, as distinct from analysis, with a view to finding out what happens; to examine the value of the therapist's having an active attitude to the developmental possibilities inherent in various kinds of symbols and symbolic occurrences; and to show that the nature of effective interaction is the same whether the treatment is labelled analysis or psychotherapy.

The analyst pays attention to what he is doing, to what the patient is doing, and to the psychodynamics of what is happening. In this work, actions and interactions are of even greater interest than are concepts. Concepts distract from actions through turning them into things; they can be used defensively against experiencing and understanding the patient as a person. Without neglecting the careful consideration of nouns we have to be even more closely acquainted with verbs.

Over the years interest had gradually deepened in the theoretical bases of the various types of treatment. Jung, in ‘Problems of modern psychotherapy,’ says: ‘The doctor is as much “in the analysis” as the patient.’ In ‘Medicine and psychotherapy’ (1945) he says: ‘The real point is the treatment of the whole psychic human being.’ In ‘Fundamental questions of psychotherapy’ (1951) he says (p. 116), ‘The intelligent psychotherapist has known for years that any complicated treatment is an individual, dialectical, process’ and, later in the same paper, ‘I therefore consider it my main task to examine the manifestations of the unconscious … but… the symbols produced by the unconscious derive from archaic modes of psychic functioning’ (p. 123). These considerations are theoretical statements arrived at through clinical experience. They apply in brief as well as in long therapy.

In the paper ‘Analytical psychology and psychotherapy’, originally published in 1949, Fordham writes: ‘In stating that analytical psychology can contribute to the theory of psychotherapy it is nece