Psychoanalysis is a subjective experience.

What is psychoanalysis?

Sigmund Freud called psychoanalysis the “talking cure”. It is a method that allows the subject, through talking, to encounter and subsequently take responsibility for what causes them suffering and which presents itself in the enigmatic form of a symptom.

The task of the professional, as is the case with all the psychologists and psychotherapists at our practice in Cernusco sul Naviglio, is to help the subject construct a question, to open up to questions, their questions, supporting them in listening to themselves and constructing their own personal answers, becoming a partner in the subject's work.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the symptom is a message to be interpreted, a symbolic organisation, a discourse that contains meaning. It is the compromise solution that the subject has unconsciously found to cope with something else that they may not yet be aware of.

The symptom “speaks” first and foremost to the person who suffers from it, and the subject may pause to notice how the symptom signals something beyond the suffering it entails. This leads the person to give a pre-interpretation, a reading that often leads to consultation with a professional in order to better interpret this curious message with an unknown meaning. It could therefore be said that the subject, without knowing it, expresses themselves in and through the symptom.

These few lines do not claim or seek to provide an exhaustive answer to the question of what the psychoanalytic method consists of. Even if one wanted to, it would be impossible to do so, precisely because psychoanalysis is nothing more than a subjective experience, an experience that takes place both inside and outside the context of psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

‘What is psychoanalysis? It is reading, or interpreting, the hidden message that unconscious desire has deposited in the symptom that causes suffering. This desire does not coincide at all with what one wants or believes one wants. Often, analysis begins precisely when the subject realises that there is a split between their conscious will and their unconscious desire.’

Jacques Lacan (The Seminar. Book VI. Desire and its Interpretation 1958-1959)

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) is the father of psychoanalysis.

He himself defined it as '[...] a procedure for investigating psychic processes that would otherwise be almost impossible to access; [...] a therapeutic method (based on such investigation) for the treatment of neurotic disorders; [...] a series of psychological insights gained in this way, which gradually accumulate and converge into a new scientific discipline.'

After graduating in medicine in 1881, he became a specialist in nervous diseases in 1885 and began working in Paris with the renowned clinician Charcot. It was with Charcot that he first encountered hysteria, something profoundly new and different from medical knowledge at the time, as hysterical symptoms are an exception to conventional knowledge in that they are bodily symptoms that have no aetiology, or cause, in the body. His subsequent collaboration with Breuer led to the publication of Studies on Hysteria in 1895. In 1900, he published The Interpretation of Dreams, a revolutionary text highlighting how dreams speak to human beings and about human beings, as Freud identified dreams as the “royal road” to the unconscious. The development of Freudian theory is based on a number of fundamental concepts, such as transference, the first and second topics (conscious, preconscious, unconscious; Id, Ego, Super-Ego), the Oedipus complex, libido, the conflict between Eros and Thanatos, etc. In 1908, the first Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Society was held.