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.
We like to think there is this core of human nature – that good people can't do bad things, and that good people will dominate over bad situations. Infact, when we look at the Stanford prison studies, that we put good people in an evil place, and we saw who won. Well, the sad message in this, is in this case is the evil place won over the good people.
There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum.
People have a range of capacities to deal with overwhelming experience. Some people, some kids particularly, are able to disappear into a fantasy world, to dissociate, to pretend like it isnt happening, and are able to go on with their lives. And sometimes it comes back to haunt them.
There are absolutely ways to manipulate behavior, because our behavior is endlessly being manipulated by the world around us.
We live in a world where most people still subscribe to the belief that shame is a good tool for keeping people in line. Not only is this wrong, but it’s dangerous. Shame is highly correlated with addiction, violence, aggression, depression, eating disorders, and bullying.
There is no fun in psychiatry. If you try to get fun out of it, you pay a considerable price for your unjustifiable optimism.
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