Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history. (243)
Interpretation
This quote highlights how confronting past relationships can transform them from a source of distress into valuable life lessons.
Norman Doidge's quote emphasizes the process of psychoanalysis in which individuals confront and understand their past relationships. Rather than allowing these memories and experiences to haunt them, patients learn to process these 'ghosts', integrating them into their personal history, which enables them to heal and move forward in their lives. This transformative process allows for personal growth and a healthier present by acknowledging and reframing the past.
In practice
In a therapy session, I reminded my patient of the quote by Norman Doidge to encourage them to view their past relationships as sources of strength rather than burdens.
Analysis helps patients put their unconscious procedural memories and actions into words and into context, so they can better understand them. In the process they plastically retranscribe these procedural memories, so that they become conscious explicit memories, sometimes for the first time, and patients no longer need to "relive" or "reenact" them, especially if they were traumatic.
Nothing speeds brain atrophy more than being immobilized in the same environment.
We must be learning if we are to feel fully alive, and when life, or love, becomes too predictable and it seems like there is little left to learn, we become restless - a protest, perhaps, of the plastic brain when it can no longer perform its essential task.
All of us have worries. We worry because we are intelligent beings. Intelligence predicts, that is its essence; the same intelligence that allows us to plan, hope, imagine, and hypothesize also allows us to worry and anticipate negative outcomes.
Many psychoanalysts refused to let me speak at their meetings. They were exceptionally vigorous because I had previously been an analyst and they were very angry at my flying the coop.
Worrying about scarcity is our culture's version of post-traumatic stress. It happens when we've been through too much, and rather than coming together to heal (which requires vulnerability) we're angry and scared and at each other's throats.
The unconscious mind is decidedly simple, unaffected, straightforward and honest. It hasn't got all of this facade, this veneer of what we call adult culture. It's rather simple, rather childish It is direct and free.
The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to feel important.
They don’t need walls and water to keep the prisoners in, not when they’re trapped inside their own heads, incapable of a single cheerful thought. Most go mad within weeks - Lupin
There is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and ... if that procedure is employed, every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.