Symptoms of the past  

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The dominant view in common thinking about psychodynamic therapy is that the therapist looks for the source of the patient's problems in the past. Following this line of thinking, the therapist is then in the role of a detective tracking traces and an archaeologist immersed in excavations of the past. Such associations easily arise because Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was a staunch admirer of archeology and was fascinated by it. But it will not be here about Freud's fascinations.

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What is the connection between the past and therapeutic practice? Does the therapy room resemble the scenery?  where the shadow theater of childhood drama takes place, where parental figures play a primary role? Psychodynamic therapy is often accused of being focused on what happened rather than on the actual life. Even more radical views are that therapy is "an escape from real life." More than once we say: "It was, it has passed - why come back to it", "I will not change anything anyway - what is important is what is."

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Let's start with the fact that the past itself is not the domain of psychotherapy. The past of a man who comes for help is not a historical past that needs to be described, reconstructed and told. Psychotherapy is not an examination, and the therapist is not an investigator. The psychotherapist does not talk about the past, but talks to the patient who has a past. This past is not a specific place where the patient and the therapist travel. The past in the therapist's thinking is a certain area of the individual's experience that has not been fully lived out. The prominent American psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden described the therapeutic process as the process of "experiencing an unlived life." Ogden postulates that some past events have been experienced but not lived. Untreated experience is one that has not been emotionally incorporated into the individual's consciousness and has not become meaningful. Untreated experiences cannot contribute to the mental development of a person because they lack meaning.  What we often seek is sense - the sense of who we are, what we do, where we are going.

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Everyone carries some past experiences within them that have never been spoken. These are our intimate stories that never found a way to be expressed. We can think of an unlife past as an emotionally active and present area where silence and emptiness reign. It is an inner island that is unpopulated and inanimate. Our sense of loneliness, the feeling of being misunderstood, our conflicts, boredom, indifference and powerlessness - these are areas of the untapped past. A symptom is an experience that has not been lived. We can numb the symptoms in a number of ways. One of the common ways is not to think. However, what we try to remove from our consciousness often comes back with double force. This was Sigmund Freud's intuition. The suffering that often brings people to therapy is suffering caused by the fact that something misunderstood and beyond our control is happening in life. It is a past that has not been lived.

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Find  my time

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The essence of the therapy is the current time, during which two people meet - the therapist and the patient - at each session. Psychotherapeutic treatment takes time. Despite the fact that the therapist proposes a certain therapeutic framework, the patient dictates the rhythm and pace of meetings - in this sense the therapist is the patient's student. Meanwhile, the therapist is an expert in understanding that the patient has his time - and that time should be respected and understood. It is a relationship time. The time it takes to find thoughts and words in a therapeutic relationship that will allow you to express, live, and understand an unthinkable experience. The therapeutic process is an attempt to regain untapped time.

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In the therapeutic process, the patient has the right to keep some of his stories for himself. Therapy is not a confession. There is no code to speak. Even more so, it is difficult to think that the therapist forces you to talk. If psychotherapy is to do its job, it should free us from the compulsion. First of all, therapy is not talking, but talking. The patient has the right to intimacy and not to share with the therapist everything that comes to his mind. The essence of psychotherapy is freedom and respect for the patient's time. Everyone has their own time. Each of us needs to find our time.

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Psychodynamic psychotherapy is therefore neither therapy oriented towards ghosts of the past nor therapy about the terror of childhood and the patient's parents. It is a conversation that happens every time the patient meets the therapist. It is a conversation with the patient and his suffering.  Psychodynamic therapy is a dialogue. A dialogue that requires two separate people. When we come to therapy, we feel discomfort because our suffering has no words. We feel nameless suffering. The person who asks for help has the hidden hope that something will happen that will ease his suffering. What causes growth and change is prolonged effort in conversation - finding thoughts and words that create connections and bridges between the patient's past and present, between forgetting and recalling, understanding and not understanding. Growth and change is the experience and emotional knowledge that I can find and find myself in the presence of another person.

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Bibliography:

Ogden, TH (2018). Fear of breakdown and a life not lived. In: Experiencing an unlived life. Warsaw:  Ingenium publishing house,

Casement, P. (2017).  Learning from the patient. Warsaw:  Ingenium publishing house,