Introductory Lectures on Neuropsychoanalysis: Lecture Five Part 6 " How to Treat the Mind" Ending Phase/New Prediction

ENDING PHASE AND NEW PREDICTION.................Once your patient's new prediction wins out over the old one, they will get their basic emotional need met, and they will no longer need treatment. The unpleasant feeling/symptom that brought them to therapy will also go away because it was only there due to the unmet basic need. So now your patient is likely to say they are feeling much better, their relationships are now working, and they are getting their basic need met. If you agree with your patient then you can discuss an appropriate termination date....... The termination process is also an important and necessary phase in neuropsychoanalysis/psychotherapy. Again, this ending phase of the work is standard discussion in psychoanalytic treatment, so I will not go over that common knowledge here. What I will say has to do with the unique contribution of neuropsychoanalysis theory and technique to the Ending Phase. And that contribution is to remember that in neuropsychoanalytic therapy you can never get rid of an unconscious, automatized, repressed prediction from childhood. You can only help your patient develop a new one alongside the old one. This is why therapy takes a long time. The patient has to gradually learn the new prediction, and gradually implement it in their lives. During this last termination/ending phase you help your patient understand this, and make sure they are capable of doing this work now on there own. As the patient becomes more and more sure that the new prediction is fully in place in their lives, the more confident they will be in ending the treatment. And if in the future, through deleterious events in their lives, the patient is unable to work through their regressed states on their own, they can always return to therapy for a brief or extended time...... So this is how you conduct neuropsychoanalysis/psychotherapy that is based in psychoanalytic theory and technique, with contributions and alterations from neuroscience. It is the integration of these two fields that constitutes neuropsychoanalysis/psychotherapy.