Seven Introductory Lectures on Neuropsychoanalysis/Psychotherapy: Lecture Five, Part 1" How to Treat the Mind" Beginning Phase/Presenting Feeling

In this lecture I want to talk about how to do neuropsychoanalytic psychotherapy--insight to supportive. How do we carry it out? What techniques do we use?   In the next few Lectures, I will answer these questions by describing how the neuropsychoanalytic approach to treatment  is both similar to yet different from Modern Freudian psychoanalytic therapy. 

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 is their symptom? 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 and others I have previously noted, are Primary Emotions. But patients  may also present with guilt, shame, envy, jealously, etc., which are Secondary Emotions, often occurring when two or more primary emotions  conflict.

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 unpleasant 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 feeling has a meaning. Their feeling is a  symptom of a deeper problem. And the deeper problem is that they are not sufficiently getting one of their seven emotional needs met. 

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  they come to treatment. Unpleasant feelings  is the definition of psychopathology in neuropsychoanalytic therapy. 

And your first task as a therapist is to access your patient's psychopathology, 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 bring about the cure for their bad feelings 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.