Personality systems, like hospitals, are rarely changed by a single act, no matter how disturbing. An intrusion, whether the firing of an administrator or a brilliant interpretation, may cause temporary chaos, but damage control soon takes over. If effort is not sustained, the system will slump back into a condition much like its original state. It takes sustained effort to change a bureaucratic system and sustained follow up to change a personality system. In a personality, as in a hospital, a relatively small force exerted at the right point but sustained for enough time will permit change to become incorporated into the system. Thereafter, people in the system will not even remember how it used to be. Similarly, persons whose personality has changed often will hardly remember how they used to be. The therapist will have to point out that three months ago the patient could not have done “this,” and a year ago he wouldn’t even have thought about it. (p. 19)
The neurotic system has limited flexibility because it embodies assumptions that are unrealistic, assumptions that might have been realistic in the infantile years, but even then might have been fantastic. (p. 19)
This formulation of the idea of neurosis as a system permits recasting the idea of analyzing. Rather than viewing analysis as an attempt to dismantle or destroy an architectural structure (for instance, to “undermine” or “break down” resistance), one could view it as repeatedly interfering with the patient’s efforts to re-create the neurosis in the analytic situation. The analyst interferes with the reassembling of erroneous constructions, emotion-laden perceptions, and idiosyncratic ways of thinking that draw inspiration from, and are intended to support, neurotic assumptions and to avoid awareness of alternatives. To the extent that one has relatively fixed internal commitments, such as to the unconscious fantasy underlying a neurosis, one’s personality is a semiopen system. From a cognitive point of view, one could say that it avoids recognizing disconfirming evidence; a neurosis is relatively “data proof.” (p. 20)
It is the task of the analysis to figure out what the problem is for which the neurosis is the unworkable solution, but thus far the only one the patient has been able to imagine. By taking this stance, the analyst conveys his respect for the ingenious, if painful and impractical, measures the patient has felt compelled take in order to live with his as yet unseen problem. It will then be possible to help the patient discover the conflicting underlying assumptions that he had to adopt both to construct the problem and to limit the range of solutions. Patient and analyst will inquire into the remarkable way the patient’s mind works even now to insist that this impracticable solution is both exclusive and inevitable. The patient will come to understand that at some early time, when his comprehension of reality was limited, it must have seemed the best solution available. He also will discover why these problems and solutions, of whose connections he is hardly aware, have yielded the plan of action, the script, for his current life. (p. 37)
In analysis, too, the task is to discover what the question or problem was to which the patient’s odd behavior is the answer or solution. As in the quiz show parody, we presume that the patient’s “answer” is correct, but what could the question have been? (p. 37)
(Just like Collingwood)
Last revised on August 19, 2023 at 04:43:47. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.