The Middle Phase of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

 The Middle Phase of Psychoanalytic Therapy

In my last post I wrote about the Beginning Phase of Therapy. In this post I want to share with you about the Middle Phase.

The Middle Phase of Therapy begins once you and your therapist establish a relationship, agree to work together, and develop goals or areas of your life to work on.

Now the actual therapeutic work begins. From this moment forward you will be working through your problems and gaining understanding of them. You will look at your childhood and see how past relationships with parents and siblings have influenced your present functioning. For instance, if you are struggling today with the loss of a job, and you also lost a parent by death at an early age, you will explore with your therapist how the earlier loss has made you particularly sensitive to the job loss in the present. You will work on coming to understand thoughts that have been unconscious ( out of your awareness), and allow those thoughts into your conscious mind (self awareness.) The change takes place because once the formerly unconscious thoughts become conscious you have more power to manage them and their resultant feelings. So in the example above, you would work with your therapist to help you see how the loss of your parent was so painful that you could not resolve your grief as a child. Thus, your mind chose to put your grief away -to bury it and defend yourself from feeling it. The loss of your job has now triggered that unaware and unresolved childhood loss, and in working through the loss of your job in the present, you also work through the earlier loss of your parent. Eventually you experience healing of both losses.

Working through the areas of emotional suffering in your life takes time, usually years verses months. It also takes regularly scheduled sessions, one to two per week. So you can see it not only takes time; it also takes commitment. But if you stick with it and have the courage to remain faithful to the task, you will experience deep changes in yourself and your personality. And you will be a happier less anxious or depressed person. You will be better able to pursue the desires of your life in a more emotionally mature and appropriate way.

When you have sufficiently worked through your problem areas and are feeling you have accomplished your goal of emotional health, you will be ready for the Ending Phase of Psychotherapy. I will share with you about that phase in my next post.