Introductory Lectures on Neuropsychoanalysis: Lecture Five Part 2 " How to Threat the Mind" Beginning Phase/Presenting Feeling

THE BEGINNING PHASE ................... In this lecture I want to talk about how to do neuropsychoanalytic psychotherapy. How to carry it out. What techniques to use. I am going to follow the basic therapy divisions of the Beginning Phase, The Middle Phase, and the Ending Phase......The beginning phase of conducting a neuropsychoanalytic treatment is the assessment phase. In this phase you are asking yourself as the clinician, "What is wrong with my patient? What is bothering them? Why have they come for therapy? What are their symptoms? In neuropsychoanalytic therapy assessment you particularly look for what unpleasant feeling the patient is experiencing. The most common unpleasant feelings patients present with are the following: FEAR anxiety, PANIC anxiety, GRIEF/depression, RAGE/anger, Sexual (LUST) frustration, etc. These are primary emotions. They may also present with guilt, shame, envy, jeasously, etc., which are secondary emotions, which I will write about later. The first thing you want to do as the therapist in assessing your patient for neuropsychoanalytic therapy is to find out what is the major feeling they are suffering from. And if you listen closely at the beginning of the treatment the patient will usually tell you what feeling is bothering them. They will say," I am sad, I am tense, I am afraid, I am angry." They may have several different feelings they are suffering from. But you want to try and assess the predominant feeling that is bothering them. The reason for this is their feelings have meaning. Their feelings are symptoms of a deeper problem. And the deeper problem is that they are not sufficiently getting one of their seven emotional needs met. As you will recall from my earlier posts these seven basic needs are: FEAR when not feeling safe. PANIC or GRIEF when not feeling securely attached, RAGE when impediments stand in the way of getting basic needs met, LUST when sexual needs are frustrated, depression or anxiety when not able to CARE for others, depression when not able to SEEK out new people, things, ideas or adventures, and lack of joy and depression when not able to PLAY sufficiently in life........ If your patient was able to sufficiently meet these seven basic needs they would be mentally healthy. They would not be coming for neuropsychoanalytic therapy. It is because they are unable to meet mainly one of their basic needs that brings them to treatment. The resultant unpleasant feelings I mentioned above come about because one of their basic needs is not being met. This is the definition of psychopathology in neuropsychoanalytic therapy. And your first task as a therapist is to access your patient's pathology so that you can begin to take therapeutic steps to help cure them of it. Taking the beginning assessment steps I have described here will help you do just that. Knowing what is wrong in your patient's life, and even more importantly what is causing it, is the necessary beginning phase task required before you and your patient together can begin to cure their problems through treatment. In the next section I will write about how to proceed with therapy through the Beginning Phase and into in the Middle Phase of treatment.