MECHANISMS OF THERAPEUTIC CHANGE: SYMBOLIZATION

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

The client tells a story. Can we dwell on the idea that the meaning of the story is in the story itself? Can we think that the client is satisfied with himself? Is it true that the addressee of the story is a witness and not a co-author? No. The listener creates the story, and the narrator observes it

By telling a story, the client creates a collection of signs that point to each other and lead nowhere. The client thinks that his story is himself and it is enough to penetrate his inner world. But this is not the case. A story becomes a keyhole when the client realizes his authorship in the presence of the Other. Metaphorically, a story is a nut, the shell of which must be broken to clarify the meaning.

It seems important to me to root this idea in reality. The work begins the moment the client finds himself telling his story to someone. He seems to be moving along a bridge thrown between himself and someone else. Therapy is generally a process of building bridges. First, between the mind and the body, then between oneself and the other, then between the elements of the field. On this bridge, the client is in an intermediate space, he is no longer the only ruler of his story, it acquires new connections.

The meaning always appeals to interaction, we can say that the request itself is secondary, since it is needed only in order to clarify something about the state of the relationship. Using a query, you can avoid relationships or use them as a gateway to a shared space. Many psychological defenses are aimed at maintaining excessive autonomy, when my unconscious belongs only to me, I do not need anyone and I can do everything for myself.

Question to the therapist - what did you do for the client, what happened to you with the client? What happens to you when a client tells his story? What experience is the therapist willing to throw into the contact flame to keep it burning? The client does not ask for understanding through explanation, he asks for the result as a consequence of the new experience.

Therapy is a special form of presence that makes two strangers very important to each other. The moment I become important to someone else, it is no longer possible for me to ignore myself. This means that in therapy, with the sound of questions and answers, a special silence is created in which I begin to hear myself better.

Therapy is an attempt to express and fulfill an unconscious request, it is a search for what is meaningful to the client (“What is true and whose idea was it?” By Thomas Ogden, “Binocular Vision” by Bion, “Registry of the Real” by Lacan, the search for a good Zinker shape) … This is a study of pre-existing reality by distortion methods that result from the influence of the observer on the observed. We do not re-create experiences as a mechanism for gaining experience, but we encourage the client to implement a new version of his subjective reality, in which he himself is changing. There is truth and untruth in the therapist's response - the first is needed so that the client is able to hear the untruth, which may or may not become his own truth. The client responds to what he recognizes in the therapist's speech. And just as the therapist hears someone else's melody, he also learns to distinguish the therapist's melody in order to build it into his own polyphony.

Everyone knows the special pleasure that one feels whenever words most clearly express their meaning, when the border of language is most closely pressed against the border of sensations and they begin to correspond more closely to each other. It is both pleasure and relief from permission, as if words are the form through which the unconscious is expressed most fully. We know of many not very successful ways - resistance, reservations, reaction - but they do not provide such relief. Because with the help of words, we can give the experience finally come true, that is, to do the completed work. Actually, words are simply the best way to be heard.

Likewise, words are the best way to remain misunderstood and there is no contradiction in this. Words become alive when a signifier appears in them, that is, the psychic imprint of the one who utters them. Or words remain dead when a cut of someone else's speech sounds in them. …

Therapeutic space creates boundaries within which the unconscious mass of the therapist and the client accumulates during the session, which is then resolved in the intervention. This formation consists of the client's request and the therapist's countertransference and at some point ceases to belong entirely to one or the other, becomes a common state. Such a superposition of the unconscious allows for mutual exchange within the general system of relations. In therapy, the unconscious of the client and the therapist are mixed and the session time is the reaction time between them.

I will describe an interactive scheme for gaining experience. First, a representation of the event (primary symbolization) is formed from the emotionally sensory poorly differentiated mass, which is later translated into words (secondary symbolization), and they, being addressed to the Other, voice an unconscious request, the response to which completes the transaction, as a result of which the client's ability to improve differentiate emotional-sensory signals and so on. Receiving and assimilating the experience of another in the continuation of the tradition can be called tertiary symbolization.

There is often no connection between the products of primary and secondary symbolization. Because the task of secondary symbolization is not an explanation and acquaintance with the subject, but the exercise of influence, that is, impact. We don't tell stories, we don't need to be understood the way we understand ourselves. We need to understand our history as the Other can understand it. Words do not reflect an event that once happened, but, interacting, with the words of the other side, create a new event. Thus, history is an excuse to create a new story. The story told, or more precisely, the heard story, rewrites the event again and it remains in memory a little differently.

Secondary symbolization it is the creation of signifiers, since the representation of the event (sign) and even more so the event (object) are inaccessible, but with the help of the signifier they become timeless.

Symbolization is triggered by loneliness, the experience of the absence of an object as an organismic deficit. We carry in ourselves the traces of unsuccessful meetings and thus transfer into ourselves the experience of absence and loneliness. The experience associated with an unsatisfied - in other words, an unrecognized need - is not integrated into the structure of the personality and is not assigned to it. Failure to recognize the need asserts the power of the situation over desire and perpetuates the experience of helplessness. It is terrible when the longing of passion encounters a cold environment, which, with the help of shame, actually destroys the thirst for life. All therapeutic work is aimed at bridging the difference between two separate personalities in order for the request to be heard, shared and completed.

The unrecognized need is not integrated into the experience and becomes a repressed part of the personality, responsible for the obsessive repetition of an unfinished situation. It is often presented in the form of a psychosomatic symbol, when the absence of an emotional reaction is compensated for by a pronounced bodily presence.

For example, a client with a panic attack claims that muscle tension at the onset of the attack is equivalent to the hypertonicity that he experienced in an experiment in which he was unable to actively protest because he was not able to feel anger towards the authority figure. In this case, the bodily response replaces the missing ability to interact.

Man is a creature that poses a riddle to himself. Moreover, it happens in such a way that we are aware only of the answer, while the question remains unrecognizable. We can say that we can come closer to understanding the question only with the help of the answers that we are forced to give. The question comes from the source of our drives, reality takes our attraction into itself and changes under its influence. Therefore, what is happening to us always has a secondary meaning - everything that happens is an answer to a question that needs to be solved.

There are no mistakes or wrong choices - any exercise is just a way to reduce the tension arising from an unconscious question.