The Couch or face-to-face?

Indeed, the couch is a powerful experience. I believe this example may help you understand why: imagine your mind to be a big ocean and imagine that you sit on a raft with your therapist, discussing about what is going on in the depths of this ocean. Sitting on the raft equates to talking face-to-face: it seems safer than diving in.

Using the couch would then mean that you would dive in the ocean and while you are under the water you would keep discussing with the therapist what you see and feel. Diving in makes the whole experience a lot more personal, the emotions are o lot stronger and feel more “real”.

As long as there is eye-contact, this may work like a “hook”: the therapist is always there, supporting you, but also keeping you from forgetting about him and just diving in. The insights you get while talking on the couch are therefore more intense, but the Resistance is also stronger (for instance panic – this is the mind’s self defence mechanism trying to stop you from opening an area which was previously “locked away” because some trauma had been left there to rot).

On the couch, one is left almost alone with his thoughts, the therapist becomes a somewhat distant voice offering guidance every now and then.

K-Pax

K-PAX is another movie where things are not what they seem. K-Pax at IMDB here, movie trailer here.

I won’t go through the resume of the whole movie – unlike Mulholland Drive, the action is pretty linear here, there are no twists in the story line. I also won’t focus on the side-stories. I will just concentrate on the character “Prot” and what happened to him.

Kevin Spacey does a brilliant role as a genius delusional. He is convinced his name is Prot and that he is an alien coming from the planet K-Pax. The psychiatrist Mark Powell (played by Jeff Bridges) isn’t buying it and tries to find out as much as possible about who “Prot” really is and what happened to him.

Doctor Powell manages to identify who Prot actually is (Robert Porter) and where he lived – Guelph / Santa Rosa. Powell meets the local sheriff, who tells him the story of Robert Porter. As the sheriff starts telling the story, he starts off with a funny line: “according to the official story …” The sheriff tells Powell, how Robert Porter came home one day to find his wife and daughter viciously killed by one Darryl Walker. Robert kills Darryl but he can’t live anymore with the pain of having lost his wife and daughter, so he throws himself in a river behind his house. The suicide attempt fails and Robert doesn’t die but goes insane (invents the character Prot).

But is this what really happened?

Let the analysis begin.

There are a lot of hints that are dropped throughout the movie.

It begins with Prot telling Dr Powell that he came to Earth 4 years and 9 months ago, and that he would go back to K-Pax precisely on July 27. Dr Powell realizes that July 27^th would be exactly 5 years to the day when Prot “arrived” to Earth. From that Dr Powell correctly understands that something traumatic had happened to this patient on July 27, almost 5 years before.

Prot starts telling Dr Powell about his world. On K-Pax everything is different then on Earth: there are no families, sex is extremely unpleasant, there are no laws (and also no lawyers LOOOL), and no police. In the discussions Prot reveals himself to be a very smart individual.

The key to understanding what really happened to “Prot” lies in the hypnosis sessions.

There are a total of 3 hypnosis sessions in the movie.

First session: Dr Powell asks Prot to go back in time as much as he can. Prot starts talking with a child’s voice about his human friend, who calls him whenever he is in trouble. His friend had called him because something bad had happened to his father. Prot refuses to talk about his friend’s father and Dr Powell correctly understands that something bad must have happened to him, that “Prot” was repressing his memory. Eventually Prot reveals that his friend’s father had just died, and that he used to work in a slaughter-house.

Second session: Prot regresses to 1985, when his friend was 17 years old. His friend had again summoned Prot. His friend was upset that his girlfriend was pregnant and that he was now stuck with her. Prot’s next memory is from 1991. He tells that his friend was now also a “knocker” (like his father, in a slaughter-house), that his friend’s wife name was Sarah and that their 6-year-old daughter was named Rebecca.

Third session: Dr Powell asks Prot to go back in time to July 27, 1996 (the date when Prot said that he arrived to Earth). Prot tells how his friend had called him. Prot recalls how his friend is trying to kill himself by drowning in the river behind his house. Dr Powell insists that Prot tell him why his friend wants to kill himself, but Prot resists. The key to the whole movie is in this last hypnosis session: Dr Powell presses Prot to reveal the reason for his friend’s suicide attempt and tells Prot that it is ok if his friend had done something to Sarah or Rebecca. Dr Powell doesn’t finish his sentence though because Prot snaps: he reaches for Dr Powell’s throat and then collapses crying in agony and desperation.

That scene is the key! Prot’s friend was of course himself. Robert Porter and Prot were one and the same. He was not an alien. Robert Porter killed his wife and child and tried to make it look like a drifter – Darryl Walker – had done it. Robert Porter wanted to be free from his family. The set-up was perfect: everybody believed that Darryl had killed the wife and daughter; yet Robert couldn’t live with himself after what he had done. So, he tries to kill himself, but fails. 4 years and 9 months later he arrives at the Psychiatric Hospital and to Dr Powell.

The “official” story would have you believe that Robert found his wife and daughter killed and then he killed their aggressor. Following this trauma he became schizophrenic, believing he came from an alien planet. The only problem with that is that Robert Porter had always been schizophrenic. From the very first hypnosis session we find out that “Prot” already existed as Robert was a very young child. Further on, Prot tells Dr Powell how “his friend” – in fact himself – is unhappy with his life, with the fact that he now is responsible for his wife and daughter. He wanted “out” so he killed his wife and daughter and then went completely crazy.

In the end, on July 27, 5 years after he killed his wife and daughter and tried to frame it on Darryl, Robert Porter / Prot turns catatonic.

What is the Resistance in Psychoanalytical Therapy?

As discussed in the previous post, the therapist will encourage you to live your symptoms instead of hiding them. Living them out, within the therapy (and NOT outside of it) will enable further exploration of the underlying causes of your symptoms.

Seems simple enough and straightforward. And yet it can be – and it most often is – a painful exercise. It simply is hard, difficult and painful to expose yourself completely naked in front of a stranger, even if that stranger is a professional therapist there to help you, even if he or she doesn’t judge you and does their best to support you throughout the process.

This is what is referred to as Resistance: the person being analyzed “resists” the analysis, refuses to allow free associations to take place, refuses to tell the therapist everything that goes on in their mind, refuses to let go of their self-control. Such behavior is usually motivated by feelings of fear, shame, pride that are triggered whenever analysis is about to reveal something that you don’t actually want to confront.

Resistance itself is also analyzed – because it reveals how you repress those desires that you don’t want to deal with. It is important to understand how you repress – because that is usually an echo of the way you first started repressing (in the childhood).

Or in other words, the mechanisms used for resisting analysis are the same ones you used as a child to “resist” your parents. If you “resist” your therapist out of fear, then it means you were afraid of your parents, of the way your parents were educating you – for instance.

What is a Symptom?

People go to therapy to get rid of symptoms: maybe you can’t sleep, or you have some kind of an obsession, or have bad relationships one after the other, or you’re simply unhappy and can’t find an answer on your own.

So how does Psychoanalysis relate to symptoms?

Psychoanalysis doesn’t try to suppress symptoms. Psychoanalysis regards symptoms as by-products of the fight for control between your conscious mind and your repressed desires, banished in your unconscious mind. By analyzing the symptoms, the therapist helps you to discover what it is that you are repressing. Once you discover what it is that you secretly desire (and usually those are socially forbidden desires) you can start finding ways to deal with them (without repressing). Once the repression disappears, the symptom is no longer needed.

The issue is that repressed desires don’t go away simply because we don’t accept them: they look for other ways to express themselves; they try to bypass the censorship.

It’s like in a dictatorship. In a dictatorial society the power is concentrated in the hands of very few people. All the rest must submit. Such societies are unstable: the Leadership uses force to repress any dissent. Those who do want to dissent know that force will be used against them – so their resistance goes underground. That is to say, they will not dissent openly but instead they will look for hidden ways to manifest themselves. The more the Leadership tries to crush any dissent, the more refined the dissent becomes, in order to avoid detection.

Things happen similarly in our minds: desires that we repress find mechanisms to express themselves and yet avoid detection. Those very mechanisms are the symptoms. Therefore, far from trying to suppress a symptom, psychoanalysis uses it, in order to get to whatever it is that is trying to express itself through that symptom. Once the underlying cause is exposed and dealt with, the symptom will disappear – there will be no more need for it anymore.

Mulholland Drive

David Lynch is a genius when it comes to psycho movies. I don’t know if the man actually studied this stuff or is just incredibly talented (or both).

Mulholland Drive at IMDB here. Trailer here.

I love Mulholland Drive because it is one of those movies in which nothing is what it seems to be. Nothing seems to really make sense (the scene towards the end, at Club Silencio is A M A Z I N G!!!!).

Spoiler alert! If you haven’t seen the movie yet, please watch it first before reading this!!!

The movie is divided in 2 sections, at the scene where the Cowboy sticks his head in Betty’s bedroom and tells her: “Hey, pretty girl. Time to wake up.”

Until then, there is one story, the main characters have a set of names and after that there is a different story, with different names.

So, let’s review the first section:

• Betty is a promising actress. She had just moved in LA, in her aunt’s apartment and is trying to make it big in the movie industry. We see her giving a brilliant audition for the lead role in a hot upcoming movie. Her audition performance blows the staff away, but she fails to get the part because of a massive Hollywood conspiracy.
• The Conspiracy: in scenes reminding of Twin Peaks (red curtains everywhere, the Godfather secluded behind glass walls), a conspiracy of powerful Hollywood producers is ordering the movie director Adam to cast another girl for the part (thus robbing Betty of her chance). “That’s the girl” is the only line the producers repeat to Adam, over and over again, without any further explanation. There is also a picture being shown all the time, with a blonde woman, with the name Camille Rhodes written on it.
• Rita – she narrowly escapes an assassination attempt, right at the beginning of the movie. While her limo was driving down Mulholland Drive, she is about to be executed, a victim of an ordered kill. She gets lucky however – as the assassin prepares to shoot, the limo gets slammed by another car full of drunken teenagers. Rita survives and wonders off, finally making her way to the apartment where Betty had just moved in. The accident causes her however to lose her memory and she assumes the name Rita. She is afraid for her life and trusts only Betty.
• Who is Rita? Betty tries to help Rita figure out who she is. They look in her purse but find no ID – just a lot of money and a strange blue key. Rita remembers “Mulholland Drive” and Betty finds out from the police that there had been indeed a car accident on Mulholland Drive the previous night. Rita also remembers a name “Diane Selwyn”. The 2 women find where “Diane Selwin” was living. They find her however dead, in her bed, and already decomposing. They are nowhere near figuring out WHO Rita is.
• Rita and Betty fall in love – The 2 women become lovers. They become intimate, but that very same night something strange happens: Rita wakes up at 2 a.m. and takes Betty to Club Silenzio.
• Club Silencio – very weird things happen here. The MC keeps repeating and shouting (sometimes in Spanish and French) that the music is playing, although there is no orchestra to play it. Then Rebekah del Rio makes an appearance and sings “Crying”. The lyrics are here. While Rebekah del Rio sings, Rita and Betty start crying, with Betty shaking violently.
• The first half of the movie ends abruptly: Rita disappears while opening the blue box with the blue key and Betty wakes up, after the Cowboy had told her it was time to wake up.

The second section of the movie is very different from the first one. We find out Betty’s name is actually Diane Selwyn, Rita’s name is Camille Rhodes. Rita/Camille suffers from no amnesia and Diane/Betty is far from becoming a movie superstar. Diane/Betty doesn’t live in her aunt’s beautiful apartment on Beverly Hills but is actually living in the same house where Betty and Rita had found “Diane Selwyn” dead and decomposed.

As soon as Diane/Betty wakes up, we witness a series of flash-backs:

• Diane/Betty with Camille/Rita intimate on the couch
• The 2 women arguing, because Camille wanted to dump Diane. It becomes obvious that Diane suffers a lot because Camille doesn’t want to be with her anymore.
• Diane/Betty watches by, as Camille/Rita falls in love with the director – Adam.
• Diane/Betty at Twinkie’s, where she pays a hit man to kill Camille. She puts her picture on the table and just says “That is the girl” exactly as the producers were telling Adam which actress he was supposed to cast in the lead role.

The flashbacks finish and we see Diane getting a phone call from Camille to come to a party, at Adam’s place, on Mulholland Drive. There, at the party, Diane finds out that Camille will marry Adam.

The movie ends with Diane going crazy and killing herself.

So, what really happened? Let the analysis begin J

Between the first and second half of the movie, there are a lot of things that are repeated, although in different circumstances.

Here they are:

• “That is the girl” – the producers repeat this line over and over again to Adam. The woman in the picture is called “Camille Rhodes”. “That is the girl” is also the line that Diane uses when she tells the hit man who she wants him to kill. She also shows him a picture of “Camille Rhodes”, but the pictures show different women. In the first half of the movie, Camille Rhodes was a blonde woman (it was the woman that kissed Rita/Camille at Adam’s party), but in the second half it turns out that Rita is actually Camille Rhodes.
• The blue key and the money in the purse – while trying to find out who Rita was, Betty searches her purse but finds a lot of money and a funny looking blue key. At Twinkie’s, Diane brings the money for the assassin in a purse and gets from him the promise that once the contract is carried out, she will receive from him a blue key.
• Coco – she is Adam’s mother in the second half of the movie but she is the administrator of the apartment complex in the first half. Throughout the entire movie though, Coco has no sympathy for either Rita or Camille.
• The Cowboy and the Hollywood producers – they were just simple guests at Adam’s party; although in the first half of the movie they were feared by everyone.

Only in a dream our minds pick events that actually happened in reality and elaborate them into complicated plots. So Diane/Betty must have been dreaming. One half of the movie is her dream, while the other one is reality. But which is which?

Diane was in fact a failure as an actress. She couldn’t get the lead role in Adam’s movie – Camille got it. Diane and Camille had a relationship but Camille wanted out. Diane couldn’t bear the thought of living without her though. Out of desperation and rage she hires a hit man to kill Camille. The hit man tells her that once he gets the job done, he will leave a blue key on her table. At the very end, before Diane kills herself, the key was indeed on the table – so the contract had been carried out. Diane’s pain doesn’t go away however, and she kills herself. So, it all is a crime of passion followed by suicide – but leave it to David Lynch to turn THAT into a cinematographic first class spectacle!

The first half of the movie is Diane dreaming during the night – her unconscious mind tries to make things right but in the end gets caught up again by reality.

Diane’s dream is an attempt of a new beginning: Diane has a new identity – Betty – while Camille has amnesia – so she doesn’t remember that she actually wanted to dump Diane. Furthermore, Rita is frightened and vulnerable – that is to say she is completely dependent of Betty (quite the opposite of the real life, where it was Diane who was dependent on Camille’s love). Betty and Rita fall in love all over again, but Rita still dumps Betty (symbolically):at the Club Silenzio scene, the song that is sang is more than relevant: it tells the story of a woman who had been betrayed in her love and who couldn’t go on living without her lost love (that was exactly the situation in which Diane was finding herself) It is Rita who takes Betty to Club Silencio – the break up is thus again, even in the dream,  re-enacted.

In Diane’s dream, Betty is an extremely talented actress – but she still doesn’t get her lead role. The Hollywood conspiracy is not real; it is fantasised by Diane’s mind in order to justify her inability to get the part in real life. The dream keeps repeating the words with which Diane condemned Camille to death:  “That is the girl” over and over again. It is an echo of her guilt, for the crime that she had committed.

Towards the end of the dream, we get warned of Diane’s desire to kill herself: Betty and Rita find “Diane Selwyn” dead and half decomposed in the exact same bed where she would later commit suicide.

Chronologically speaking, the first scene in the movie is the one where Diane gets called by Camille to come to Adam’s party. Once Diane returns home, she goes to sleep and starts dreaming. The next morning she wakes up and finds the key on the table: the contract had been fulfilled. Camille was dead

Only one question remains: did David Lynch plan this whole thing or is he just incredibly talented?

The role of Childhood in Psychoanalysis

A lot of irony has been thrown at Psychoanalysis on the idea that it regards adults’ issues as mere reflections of early childhood traumas.
As if, adult life and childhood life would be disconnected: some kind of switch magically activates when we turn 18, suddenly transforming us in responsible and mature adults.

Psychoanalysis – it is said – reduces an adult (any adult) to a child terrorized by his/her parents. It always reduces today’s problems to ancient history.

This is – obviously – a caricature.

Childhood is indeed important for psychoanalysis. Unlike in the switch theory exposed above, we don’t magically become adults just because we turned 18. Our minds develop and change all the time: what you are today is the foundation of what you can become tomorrow.
It’s like a house: build it on a strong foundation and it will weather out storms and earthquakes; build it on sand and it will fall apart at the first gust of wind.
The childhood is the time in which we lay the foundation of who we are.
To continue the house example, if a construction engineer determines the house to be structurally damaged, he won’t go about covering the cracks with plaster!? He will fix the structure of the house.
Equally, a psychoanalytical therapy will go after the emotional mechanisms acquired in childhood, mechanisms that make it difficult for the adult to function in relation to the world around him.
All neurosys have at their core the same basic symptom: the individual is not able to integrate in the world around him. Whether we’re talking phobia, obsessions, substance abuse, depression – they all relate to the same thing: the individual protects himself from the world around him, because in his mind, he cannot integrate himself. The difficulties to interact with the outside world don’t just appear out of the clear blue sky – they start off in early childhood and propagate through adulthood.
For instance, children that come from broken families are more likely to find themselves in similar situations as adults; paedophiles have been themselves sexually abused when they were children and so on.
You may think that these are pure coincidences, or you may accept that there is a causality.
That causality is the reason why childhood is so thoroughly analyzed.

Dare to take a sit on my couch?

Freud's Sofa

Take a deep breath and plunge right in. This is the place to ask your questions.

How does a psychoanalysis session work?

Everyone is curious what happens during a psychoanalysis session. What can a psychoanalyst say, that is so special, so mind-blowing, that it can cure years long of pain and suffering?!

The little secret is that it isn’t the most important what the psychoanalyst says! As hard as it may be to believe, it is not the psychoanalyst that cures, it is you that cure yourself.

Unlike surgery for instance, where the patient is sedated, where the surgeon does all alone the curing, psychoanalysis works quite differently. It is you yourself that do the healing.

That doesn’t mean to say, the psychoanalyst is redundant. His role is key: it is the psychoanalyst that guides one in the darkest corners of one’s mind – but it is you yourself that choose a different path, once you understand what the unconscious choice was to begin with. For those of you who know chemistry, the psychoanalyst’s role is similar to that of catalysts in chemical reactions: a catalyst does not react with the other components, but it makes their chemical reaction faster or possible to begin with. Without the catalyst, there would be no reaction at all or you would have to wait a long long time for it.

So how does a psychoanalysis session look like? It takes 45 minutes, and you control the conversation. You guide the conversation, you choose the topics. The psychoanalyst listens and looks for connections that your conscious mind is missing – he’s a sort of dot-connector (to use a term that is currently in fashion). The role of the psychoanalyst is to sift through the material that you are presenting him, and to point out different interpretations then the ones you usually make.

We all have things we don’t like at ourselves. We may be telling ourselves years long we should stop doing this or that and yet we can’t stop. We can’t stop, because we are not aware of the real reason why we are doing it – the reason is unconscious. By connecting the dots, you start piece by piece to reconstruct what lays hidden in your unconscious mind, you start becoming aware of the real motivations – at that point you can start making other choices, but only once you understand where you are coming from.

One rule is paramount:

Free association – you are required to say absolutely everything that comes to mind, regardless how insignificant, painful or weird it may seem to you. Ideally, you won’t make any judgement at all on what you are telling – you would simply tell everything that comes to mind.

The trick is the following: if someone says something and then in the same session tells other stories, then they must be somehow connected. It is precisely this connection that you don’t see, and it is the job of the psychoanalyst to support in finding the connections.

Ideally, there are 3 to 4 sessions a week. The idea is that you need a constant schedule, a routine, to practice this inward soul-searching.

What is Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is a method of investigating and curing emotional imbalances within the human psyche.

Psychoanalysis postulates, there are repressed emotional processes happening in the background, outside the conscience knowledge of oneself. Those processes manifest themselves as symptoms – stuff that we do although we don’t want to do it (at least, not consciously).

Therapy works by bringing unconscious emotional processes to the attention of oneself, thus allowing other choices to be made, without the need of repression.

It doesn’t involve any medication and it aims at empowering an individual by giving him access to his unconscious mind.

day 1

so, let’s see what can be done with this blog thingy