San Francisco Yearlong Program

Just what is it that we are doing in the consulting room?

How do we describe the direction of the treatment?  What guides it and what are its aims?  Persistent questions, never definitively answered, but questions that underlie the analytic process both for patient and clinician.

Is psychoanalytic treatment envisaged as a corrective, or a realignment of problematic repetitive patterns as determined by the clinician?  If not, then what is it?  If the aims are unclear, then so are the methods.

Freud directed his patients to speak freely about whatever came to mind.  In the “talking cure,” if it’s words that heal, how so?  Could it equally be considered a listening cure?

Or are our current aims more aligned with self-understanding and becoming more fully oneself? Questions of being and becoming?  Perhaps we aim to facilitate a kind of singular freedom unique to each patient.  A freedom for the patient that depends on a similar pursuit or achievement on the part of the therapist.

We certainly can’t answer these questions definitively, but in this yearlong we can think together and anew about the past, present, and future conceptions of the psychoanalytic process.