Mannerisms of Speech—A Contribution to the Working Through Process

Analysis of certain characteristic habits often reveals the deepest motives of the normal and neurotic personality. In the analysis of all kinds of patients it is undoubtedly desirable to unravel the background of personally typical habits. Perhaps it depends on the personality of the analyst whether he becomes interested in them or not. The writer has always been much interested in them and considers their analysis as belonging to the process of working through in treatment. On first suggesting to a patient that he consider analyzing his habits, one usually meets with strong resistance, but later the patient becomes interested and his coöperation is invariably rewarded by progress in the treatment. Some habits are disadvantageous to the patient and their cure is a deeply cherished secondary gain of psychoanalytic treatment. The nuclear complex (Freud) of a neurosis can be found in many of a patient's habitual actions which should be analyzed.

Freud (1) described the ultimate therapeutic effect in analysis as being obtained by a process of working through. The aim of this process is the aim of the treatment itself: overcoming and removing resistances. The patient inevitably encounters resistances and in the process of working through, the analyst is 'forcing the patient to make the transition from intellectual to affective understanding and acceptance' (2). According to Freud it is mainly the process of working through which convinces the patient of the existence and strength of the repressed instinctual urges, and this realization prevents him from faltering and becoming disappointed in the treatment. Working through is that part of the treatment which exerts a great influence on the patient; furthermore, it is what makes psychoanalysis different