Neuropsychoanalytic Diagnosis ( Part 5 )

Again, your unpleasant feeling ( in your case,  grief/depression),  results from a  faulty, unconscious, repressed, childhood prediction (ego compromise/solution) that failed to adequately resolve your  childhood conflicts or trauma. At times you may have been able to make the depressive feeling go away, by using various defense mechanisms. It is usually when these defenses fail to eliminate the depressive  feeling that you come to therapy.                                              

Your neuropsychoanalytic diagnosis also includes assessing the three levels of defenses that are utilized in the three levels of emotional disorders:  Neurotic defenses, narcissistic/borderline defenses,  and psychotic defenses. The higher level neurotic defenses are more likely to succeed in defending against the unpleasant feeling than are the  narcissistic/borderline ones. And the narcissistic/borderline defenses are more successful at defending against the bad feeling than are the psychotic ones.

When any of the above defenses fail, you experience the "return of the repressed" in the form of the unpleasant  feeling returning to consciousness.  It was  this depressive feeling that likely  brought you to treatment. 

Since this unpleasant feeling is the result of an unmet basic emotional need/drive (id), which results  from the faulty childhood prediction (ego) mentioned above, it is the discovery  of this faulty prediction that is the key difference  in neuropsychoanalytic diagnosis and the descriptive diagnosis found in the DSM.   

Again,  assessing your faulty prediction that is failing to meet your basic emotional need, goes beyond the DSM  descriptive diagnosis.                                    

Neuropsychoanalysis believes that the faulty prediction is the underlying problem. It is the cause of your  mental illness/emotional disorder. Once your faulty prediction is  properly diagnosed, you can proceed in treatment to eventually change it to a workable prediction. This neuropsychoanalytic treatment will help you to eventually  create a healthy and workable prediction .  Finally, gradually implementing this new prediction will result in your having a more  joyful life, that is no longer hampered by the feeling of depression.