Why is psychoanalysis hard? The analysand and the encounter with oneself
Why it is hard to be an analysand: five reasons that everyone who comes to a psychoanalyst’s office runs into.
Why is it hard to be the subject of psychoanalysis (an analysand)? Drawing on theory, I offer my own answer to what exactly makes it difficult for those who come to a psychoanalyst’s office (online or in person).
In psychoanalysis, you meet yourself.
In his papers on the technique of psychoanalysis, Freud said that not everyone can be analysable*. He also stressed that analysability requires a fairly high level of intelligence, and he said that elderly people could hardly undergo psychoanalysis.
In these works** Freud also emphasises a person’s subjective path, the subjective pace at which a person moves in analysis once the process has begun — that is, how long psychoanalysis will last.
The conditions in which psychoanalysis happens or does not happen today are coloured by war, and that adds even more difficulty.
So why is it hard to be an analysand? In my view there are many reasons, often very subjective and dependent on many factors, but I will describe the 5 main ones:
- The subject in analysis has to face their pain again and again, which provokes an enormous resistance to the work. And on top of that, pay quite a lot of money for it. When all you want is for someone to tell you how to change everything.
- You have to piece your story together from parts that have been forgotten (repressed, rejected) — like being a detective or an archaeologist: very painstaking work that not everyone has the patience for.
- Resistance to psychoanalysis has so many faces, and it is so hard to accept! Yet it is precisely in examining the reasons for resistance to analysis that recovery comes. Unfortunately, this too may not happen for everyone.
- Looking at yourself from the inside in the psychoanalytic process, seeing all your vulnerabilities and shortcomings, beginning to understand your own influence on your life — this is very hard and takes a lot of strength, time, patience and a wish to recover.
- In today’s world, people come to psychoanalysis to improve themselves, and as quickly as possible; they turn to a psychoanalyst as to one more service on a huge market. And then, in the course of the work, they suddenly realise that nobody is going to improve anybody, that much cannot be changed at all, and that in building relationships with people, including the psychoanalyst, we always run into nothing but ourselves in others… This breaks down the defences built on top, which threatens narcissism, illusions and sometimes even hopes.
But on what has been broken down, something new can be built. Something wonderful, sincere, varied, steady and your own. And this is the most beautiful thing I have felt in the psychoanalytic process — both in my own and in that of some of my analysands, with whom the work was able to happen despite all the difficulties listed above.
And what do you think makes psychoanalytic work difficult?
To learn more about how psychoanalysis works, watch the video:
* A disposition to psychoanalytic work with the psyche.
** Papers on psychoanalytic technique, such as “Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis” (1912), “‘Wild’ Psycho-Analysis” (1910) and others.