Patients seek psychoanalytic treatment because they suffer from one or more of a variety of psychological symptoms such as anxiety, depression, sexual and other inhibitions, obsessive thoughts, compulsive actions, irrational angers, shyness and timidity, phobias, inability to get along with friends or spouses or co- workers, low self-esteem, a sense of feeling unfulfilled, nervous irritability, and blocked creativity. The defects and repressed conflicts that cause these symptoms are usually indicative of a psychoneurosis or a narcissistic personality disorder. Normal ego functioning and the joy of life that comes with easy relationship to others are seriously interfered with or sometimes lost altogether. Psychoanalysis does not promise a quick cure but holds out the hope that through better understanding of oneself and of others one can achieve an amelioration of symptoms as well as a smoother and more effective socialization of one's behavior. Psychological maladaptations usually originate from painful misunderstandings or outright failures in the child's relationship to his or her parents. Sometimes parents lack the appropriate and attuned empathic understanding that children need. Sometimes severe physical or mental illness or the death of a parent or sibling causes serious psychic wounds. Consequently, even in adults, there remain ever-present though usually unconscious fears that the early hurtful experiences will now be repeated again with others. Transference is the unconscious expectation that the old injuries and insults will now again be suffered, only this time at the hands of friends, spouses, children, bosses, just about anybody--as if transferred from the past into the present. Transference makes one have irrational expectations from the people with whom one lives and works. For example, one may feel a need to be appreciated by one's supervisors similarly to a child's needing approval from his or her parents. Frustration of these expectations may evoke immature rage or other immature behavior. Transference causes great distress, but it also makes treatment possible. The method of treatment seems simple at first. The patient reclines on a comfortable couch in the analyst's office with the analyst seated behind the patient. The recumbent position, as well as not being able to see the analyst, minimizes distraction and allows concentration on inner experiences, thoughts, wishes, fantasies, and feelings. The patient is instructed to say absolutely everything that comes to mind without censoring anything, a technique that is called free association. This brings about a state of regression in which long- forgotten events and painful encounters are remembered, often with great clarity and intense emotions. At the same time, because of transference, the patient experiences the analyst as well, as if he or she were a figure from the past, perhaps resembling a parent. The analyst often can trace the connection between the patient's current fantasies and feelings about the analyst and the origin of these thoughts and emotions in childhood experiences. The re-experienced conflicts and traumas, together with the accompanying fears and feelings, then are interpret

Some topics in this essay:
Interpretation Dreams, Heinz Kohut, Oedipus COMPLEX, Hysteria Traditional, Initially Freud, Sigmund FREUD, Thomas Mann, Breuer Viennese, Outside United, America United, psychoanalytic theory, inner experiences, narcissistic personality, narcissistic personality disorder, psychoanalytic treatment, psychological structures, personality disorder, object relations, minds unconscious, psychoneurotic symptoms, psychoanalysts institute,