People often ask me what the psychotherapeutic process consists of, particularly when it comes to Psychoanalysis. You might appreciate these quotations from a class that I recently took:
“The principle of working to produce verbal communication shortcuts the goal of making the unconscious, conscious…When the patient is trained to convert the ingredients of internal speech into spoken words, insight emerges as a by-product of the connections established between impulses, feelings and words.” H. Spotnitz, 1969.
Sidney Love commented on this: “As questions and requests are studied, repetitious behavior is often transformed into repetitive feelings which then are verbalized. These verbalized feelings are listened and responded to as symbolic descriptions of earlier difficult family life experiences.” S. Love, 1991.