On The Path
I saw a post on the PsychCentral website this morning titled: Is There a Goal to the Psychoanalytic Process? In it the author, Leigh Pretnar Cousins, describes her original image of Psychoanaylsis as the endless "rehashing of every real or imagined detail of childhood, in a fruitless internal quest for The Answer to one's psychological distress."
I've written before about the view of Psychoanalytic treatment as an outdated approach of some limited historical value. It seems that the field of Depth Psychology has not yet done enough to counter this popular perception of the analytic process.
In her article, Cousins' image of Psychoanalysis undergoes a complete reversal through her reading of Lacanian Analyst, Bruce Fink. As she says, she discovers that "not only is there a goal to the psychoanalytic process, but it's the exact opposite of what I suspected."
The goal, she reports, is the acceptance that there is no final answer to one's thoughts, feelings and behaviors, but rather there are "certain constructions one can arrive at regarding one's life direction." In other words, analysis is about the process of conscious meaning-making about one's life.
Jung's view of the goal of the analytic process is not too dissimilar to this way of seeing things. He says:
"[Analysis] is only a means for removing the stones from the path of development."
He develops that idea further in this quote:
"There is a widespread prejudice that analysis is something like a 'cure,' to which one submits for a time and is then discharged healed. That is a layman’s error left over from the early days of psychoanalysis. Analytical treatment could be described as a readjustment of psychological attitude achieved with the help of the doctor. . . . [But] there is no change that is unconditionally valid over a long period of time. Life has always to be tackled anew.
"The new attitude gained in the course of analysis tends sooner or later to become inadequate in one way or another, and necessarily so, because the constant flow of life again and again demands fresh adaptation. . . . In the last resort it is highly improbable that there could ever be a therapy that got rid of all difficulties. Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health." [The Transcendent Function, CW 8, pars. 142-143.]
That last sentence will probably be difficult for many people to accept, but it is nevertheless true. It is often the wish for a life free of all difficulties that leads to much psychological distress. This is the wish for The Answer. Such a wish prevents us from dealing with the reality of any difficulties that do occur.
One way of paraphrasing this view of Jung's regarding the analytical goal would be to say that it does not seek The Answer to one's suffering, but the development of a person's ability to improvise an answer that is an appropriate response in the moment to a particular life situation that may arise.
The "readjustment of psychological attitude" that Jung champions is not, of course, just an activity of the ego--the habitual conscious position of the individual. It is not an "attitude adjustment" in the sense of exhorting oneself to just "get over it." It is a recognition of and relationship with the unconscious dynamics and energies which transcend the conscious control of the individual. As I wrote about in my post on Approaching the Numinous, Jung would later formulate the goal of analysis in this way:
"The fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology."