Many learn about what psychoanalysis is from textbooks or directly at its sessions. Andrei Rossokhin accepted our rules of the game to help us look at what is happening outside the doors of his office otherwise. Work, thoughts and feelings of a practitioner from the first person.
Andrey Rossokhin – candidate of psychological sciences, director of the Center for Modern Psychoanalysis, senior researcher at the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University, co -editor (together with A. Zhibo) Publishing project "Anthology of modern psychoanalysis" (Peter, 2005).
Monday
Returning from a working trip, I try to be especially sensitive to the experiences of my analyzers*associated with a week break. Often they can be hidden and manifest themselves only through dreams or accidentally dropped remarks, but sometimes you do not need to be a psychoanalyst to hear them. So it was today, when my analyzer, 40-year-old lawyer Dmitry, began to blame me for all his troubles and failures. “You are leaving all the time precisely when I especially need your help! I sometimes think that your patients are indifferent to you. How can you work from morning to evening with different people and worry with them everything that they tell you? You can only because you actually do not give a damn about all of us. I am sure: if you did not need our money, you would never have returned and lived there happily ”. Behind this aggression I hear the voice of a small offended child;In my memory, paintings of his childhood come up. Schizophrenia, a mother, who lives mostly in her inner world, was surrounded by his care and attention, then, it seemed, completely forgot about his existence. The boy reached for his father with all his might, who loved him very much, but, being the captain of the warship, he constantly went into the sea, leaving him alone with his mother. Once a father did not return from such a campaign. Dmitry’s children’s “I” found protection from the negation of this loss: in fact, the father did not die, but threw it, betrayed him. He lives somewhere where he is good, and does not remember his son. The price of such protection is the depreciation of the father’s love for his son, the destruction of the close spiritual connection with him and, as a result, the feeling of emptiness and inner loneliness of this very successful adult man. “I saw a dream in which I come to the session, and your office is closed. Someone tells me that you died. It was completely indifferent to me, ”he adds. “You are afraid that I will not return, just like your father?" – I ask. Dmitry explodes with a stream of aggression and rage directed at me and his father. Having calmed down, he says in a half -whisper: “It was so painful when he died that I was almost crazy. Then I decided that I could live without him – as if he had never been … In fact, I always loved my father, and I always needed him. I realized now that I have achieved everything thanks to his love and the power that he handed over to me ".
Tuesday
I feel that I can also carefully take care of not only my son, but also about the little girl inside myself.
“You have a new sculpture,” says my analyzer Tatyana, https://globalpharmacy24.com/drug/filagra-oral-jelly sitting on a couch and squinting indecisively looking at a wooden copy of a totem figure with a child found on the islands of Triang in Oceania. But at the next moment, she forgets about the subject of her fleeting interest and begins to tell me about her irritation, offense at her husband, who, she believes, is only interested in herself and their just born son. She feels abandoned, necessary only to feed the baby. “But I also want tenderness and care,” she exclaims … And she is silent, frightened by her rage – already in relation to her son. Suddenly, turning around, she again stares at a wooden sculpture. The figure is quite large, all the details are visible. “Strange,” she says, “when I entered, I decided that it was a mother with a child in her arms. But now it seems to me that this is not a mother, but a father. He clearly has a male face and look, turned somewhere inside himself. But he holds the child like a mother. Maybe this is still a woman?"I ask her: what, it seems to her, can feel the child in the arms of this mother-father? “He feels an inextricable connection with both his mother and his father. He is a living confirmation of their connection, their love for each other ". Already smiling, she continues: “He was born thanks to their love fusion into one whole. You know, now I suddenly remembered: when my younger brother was born, it seemed to me that my parents stopped love. I hated him and them, felt lonely and all forgotten. Perhaps after the birth of my son, I began to experience something similar – as if he were not my son, but a little brother who takes my love from my mother and dad. Your sculpture helped me again restore in myself a gentle mother and a woman who loves her husband. I feel that I can as carefully as this figure, take care not only about my son, but also about the little girl within myself. ". I think that the magical power that Tatyana gives this archaic sculpture is actually enclosed in it, or rather, in the amazing creative power of her unconscious.
* Analyzant – a person undergoing psychoanalysis.
What is psychoanalysis?
Psychoanalysis was founded at the beginning of the twentieth century by Sigmund Freud. This process of research of the unconscious is based on the identification of the hidden meaning of words, deeds, human dreams. His goal is not only the elimination of the patient’s problems, but also his help in the formation of a new “I” that can continue internal work and after the completion of psychoanalysis. Lying on a couch and not seeing an analyst, the patient must follow the basic rule of psychoanalysis: freely, without hiding, talk about his thoughts, feelings, feelings. The implementation of this process is hindered by resistance, which should be rethought and overcome. The basis of psychoanalytic technology is the development of the patient’s resistance and his relationship with the analyst, the interpretation of his dreams and unconscious conflicts associated with supplanted desires.
Center for modern psychoanalysis, tel.: (8 909) 972-0662.
Wednesday
Since my French friends gave me a small kitten Ulysses and she became my full assistant in the psychoanalytic room, cats have occupied an important place in the fantasies of my analyzers, as well as in my own. This morning was, perhaps, one of the funniest moments for my practice all the time. I worked with Alexander, the president of one of the Moscow banks, a famous and respected person, who, however, at that moment was very far from his current social status: lying on the couch, he was sincerely upset by his father’s inattention to his achievements. He had just blinded a wonderful alien ship and proudly showed it to his father, hoping for his praise and approval. The father, however, squinted at the fruit of his son’s creative imagination, condescendingly patted him on the head and continued to read his newspaper. Alexander told me about his disappointment, resentment and anger at his father, when Ulysses jumped to my knees, settled comfortably and began to rumble loudly with pleasure. I was suddenly embraced by anxiety: I was afraid that my analyzer would decide that I fell asleep and snored (!). To top it off all Ulysses, stretching sweetly, made a sound very reminiscent of a human yawn. Before that, I was not going to violate the stream of Alexander’s memoirs, but unexpectedly for myself I began to actively ask him for something. The next moment, having chuckled at myself and analyzing my fears, I, thanks to my cat’s “assistant”, understood the depth of childhood despair of my analyzant: feeling his inability to reach out to the “sleeping” father, he continued to live and work in adulthood, trying with all his might to prove his significance to him with all his might.
Thursday
Modern psychoanalysis … A course of lectures that I have been giving for many years at the Faculty of Psychological Faculty of Moscow State University, each time makes me get together internally, tune in to a serious job. I do not like to repeat myself and tell what I already know so well. I like to think in the process of lecture, build hypotheses, discuss clinical cases and be sure to learn something new-so I discover psychoanalysis for myself and for my students. This is similar to multiple underwater dives in the same place of the sea. Each new immersion is a meeting with something already familiar and at the same time delight from new unexpected little things. You notice the open blue coral, a mudding cloud of red fish, a play of light and shadow in an underwater cave – from all this the inner sense of the sea and its depths is gradually born. So today: I plunge together with my listeners into the underwater world of children’s sexuality, which can tell so much about each of us, if we allow ourselves to put on a mask, lower my head into the water and look at this amazing and actually not at all hostile inner world.
Friday
I freeze for a moment struck by the brightness and power of internal mental landscapes of Ms., suddenly opened in response to my seemingly simple “philological” replica: “light … light”. This is similar to those special moments during mountain travel, when, after an unbearably heavy ascent, you get out of the mountain pass and a new space suddenly opens in front of you – with glaciers painted with the setting sun, valleys and an alluring horizon line. So now, listening to the story of Ms. M. About what she saw in a dream of disgusting monsters, with whom she is doomed to live and fight in a dark, closed space of the mysterious palace, I experienced all her defenselessness and despair with her. At some point in her dream, she throws a stone into her frightening image and breaks the glass. The ray of light penetrates inside the palace for a few seconds, illuminates the monster, and it turns … into it itself. “Light … Sveta,” I say. I feel: as if lightning strikes Ms. M. She freezes and suddenly begins to sob ramply. I feel how the walls of this gloomy dungeon scatter from her sobs filled with pain and at the same time bear relief. Ms. M. There was a twin sister, who, as she always assured me, father and mother loved much more than her herself. When she was five years old, an accident occurred: the sister died when they played together in the yard. Her name was Sveta. Blocked, unrestrained pain in the depths of the children’s soul, wine and the need for self-punishment created Ms. painful hell. Her own unconscious told her that she could regain herself only by restoring the lost connection with her sister-two, having done, as we say, the work of grief. “I feel alive again,” there were her first words after long sobs. Like that traveler on a mountain pass, I am very happy about these newly emerging forces, but at the same time I understand well how much it remains to go through.
Saturday
Difficulties and problems are not what interferes with life, but the same natural part as joy and pleasure.
I am happy that I can finally spend all day with my family. We are unsuccessfully trying to break through traffic jams to the children’s theater;I feel: a little more, and I will begin to get nervous. Suddenly, recalling my old acquaintance, a former colonel of missile forces, I smile and calm down. Having retired, he worked in different leadership positions and once shocked his loved ones, becoming a simple taxi driver. “I am quite free, I belong to myself, and it gives me great pleasure,” was his main argument. I remember the distrust that he first experienced for these words, believing that he was hiding behind them his feeling of unrealization. Once I asked him: “What freedom is there if you spend so much time in traffic jams?"His answer struck me to the core. “In traffic jams we walked nests and live in them,” he answered. This amazing image-metaphor revealed to me the most core of his perception of life and himself in it. At that moment I realized that he really feels a happy person. For him, difficulties and problems are not what interferes with life, but the same natural part as joy and pleasure. Inner freedom is not only an unlimited flight, but also the creation of your nest, and the adoption of your dependence on loved ones and on circumstances.
Sunday
My wife and I have not received such pleasure from the film for a long time, like today. It would seem that the Hollywood film about France can tell? I have to admit: a lot. “Good year” Ridley Scott forced me to survive a lot of precious moments from a long journey through French Provence with its solar landscapes, the smell of lavender fields, pastel colors, endless vineyards and an enchanting atmosphere of human life, seducing its aftertaste.