Talking About Childhood Stuff

By Kevin Murphy M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.

A potential client rang me quite some time ago. They had been given my name by their doctor and wanted to ask about the kind of therapy I practised. I told them it was psychoanalytic psychotherapy and, recognising the word ‘psychoanalytic’ they said it wasn’t what they were looking for. They said they had ‘done all their childhood stuff’ with another therapist some time ago and didn’t want to go over it all again. They said that was all ‘dealt with’. The problem they were seeking to deal with now was a relationship issue. They thanked me for my time and hung up.
I found myself thinking again about this fragment of a conversation recently. I’m not sure, if circumstances had been any different, would I have been able persuade this person otherwise. They seemed to have their mind made up. Certainly psychoanalysis is known as the more longer term form of therapy but some 25% of my clients average 6 sessions, so what does that tell us? Most of those have relationship issues and most are happy to have someone to talk to about the problem so they can clarify things and move on. They may well lie on the couch like all my other clients but that doesn’t make it an analysis.
On the other hand the majority of my clients opt to stay in therapy for much longer and yes you could say that what they are doing is an analysis. That is not to say I am analysing their every word and intonation. It is more that they, with my help, are using the time to analyse themselves.
Let’s go back a moment to the caller I mentioned above. That person said they had done all their childhood stuff, the implication being that they didn’t want to talk about any of that again. But in the first instance, psychoanalysis does not require anyone to talk about anything in particular. If the person who had done all their childhood stuff had decided to come for therapy, then it would have run along the lines that she chose to speak on, not ones that I might have chosen. As the famous French psychoanalyst and teacher Dr Jacques Lacan once said, analysts are there to direct the treatment, not the client.
And leaving aside the question that arises for all of us around how well or otherwise we might have dealt with childhood stuff, there is another reality to consider. The childhood influences and experiences that formed us into the adults we become might well, as a result of analysis, be better understood and stop exerting repetitive control over us. But that doesn’t mean to say that any hurt that might have been caused ever fully goes away. We are human, not machines. We don’t actually come with delete buttons. Any bad things that happened always remain with us. It’s their effect on us that gets changed.
So while one can deal with childhood stuff, there is another aspect to this process that is necessary but which often doesn’t get much publicity. There has to be acceptance also. In the more populist and recent forms of psychotherapy you’ll find this word bandied about a great deal. In contemporary thinking generally ‘acceptance’ is the stage to which people are expected to get once they have ‘dealt with’ their stuff.
Psychoanalysis does not see the business of acceptance in such formal terms. Nor does it put the onus on clients to reach acceptance as proof of their well being. Such an expectation has the potential to undo any good work already done and all because a client has difficulty at the acceptance stage. In this context, not being able to accept is pathologised as another sign of illness and so the cycle begins again. The person begins to think, and is sometimes influenced into thinking, that there must be something really wrong with them if they cannot ‘accept’.
Psychoanalysis sees the condition of acceptance in a more naturalistic way. Acceptance happens if and only if the person has truly ‘dealt with’ their stuff. It doesn’t happen when they are still struggling with whatever it is they have learned about or are coming to learn about themselves. And this is often where not enough time is allowed in many contemporary therapies. Acceptance is not an immediate reaction that clicks into place. It takes as long as it takes and every individual has a different time line on it. And in the same way that it is often not a complete process, it’s not an easy one either. It may involve accepting that the business of human relationships will always contain an element of difficulty as a result of that same childhood stuff.