Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis: Lecture Five Part 3 " How to Treat the Mind" Middle Phase/Old Prediction

THE MIDDLE PHASE................ Now that you know what unpleasant feeling your patient is suffering from and the unmet basic need this symptom reflects, you are ready to ask what is their unconscious, repressed prediction. The developmental stage of your patient may help in discovering their prediction. The oedipal stage patient's prediction may reflect conflict solutions regarding several of their seven basic emotional needs, but especially their need to PLAY. The anal/toddler stage patient's prediction will often center around their RAGE need. And the oral/infant stage patient's prediction will often reflect their attachment (PANIC/GRIEF) need. Beginning to discover your patient's repressed, childhood prediction at whatever developmental stage they are functioning, leads you into the Middle Phase of the Treatment. Neuropsychoanalytic theory asserts that in childhood, patients try to get their seven basic needs met. And they are try to get them met in their families. But the problem is they try to get all seven of them met at the same time. And this cannot be done! Basic needs conflict, so the child must work out the best solution to the conflicting needs as possible. But little children have underdevelped egos and are unable to come up with very good predictions. So their little minds decide on the best prediction they can. And if it is not a workable one, which often it is not, instead of dwelling on it all the time and trying to implement it unsuccessfully with much unpleasant feeling, the child represses it. Their ego automatizes the solution. It hides it away from consciousness into the unconscious never to be remembered again. But of course the prediction has not really gone away. It continues to repeat itself in the patient's life for the rest of their life, and it continues not to work for them. And because it does not work it continues to result in a basic need not being met, and the resultant unpleasant feeling, that calls defenses into play. When their defenses against these unpleasant feelings fail, they come for therapy.......... So the first task of the Middle Phase of neuropsychoanalytic therapy is to try and discover what is the prediction that your patient is repeating in the present that is still not working for them, thus causing their emotional distress. How do you do this as the neuropsychoanalytic therapist? How do you discover the repressed, automatized, unconscious and unworkable prediction? You focus on discovering their unpleasant feeling and their developmental kevel of functioning as stated above. Then you begin to look further into their History. As the therapy proceeds you will learn many new details about their history. You will get a much fuller picture of what their life has been like. And if you listen carefully with empathy and understanding, you will begin to see in their past relationships the repeated pattern of their prediction. They will have repeated this unworkable pattern in all of their significant relationships, and the pattern will have failed to work again and again. ........... You will then begin to point this pattern out to your patient in extratransference and transference interpretations. An extrtransference interpretation has to do with repeated relationship patterns outside of the therapy in the patient's relationships with others. Transference interpretations have to do with repeated patterns within the therapy with you as their therapist. You will especially interpret extratransference and transference patterns in the patient's present relationships.......In the next section I will talk about how to do a transference interpretation. I will further explore about how to do a reconstruction.