Let's Hear It for Freedom of Speech

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


One of the questions that people who are thinking of doing therapy ask is, ‘What will I talk about?’ Everyone who comes to it has a different answer to the question.
A lucky few know exactly what it is they want to say. For the rest of us there is a lot of striving and struggling and searching for what it is we want to get out. It depends on what idea you have of therapy beforehand.
Some people have seen movies and TV shows where the therapist acts like a wise interviewer. They expect to be asked questions all the time to which they can respond in a more or less passive way.
There are other clients who believe they should focus on the particular set of circumstances that brings them to therapy, to the exclusion of other valuable areas of their lives. The focus might be an oppressive person in their lives, an unshakeable fear, a collapsed relationship, or a pattern of living that they cannot break.
There is another group who do not like talking at all. They began by thinking they wanted to try therapy but didn’t realise that it would involve work. They come and speak freely for the first one or two sessions but then suddenly they don’t come anymore.
The only conclusion you can come to is that the business of speaking about themselves wasn’t comfortable for them at all. In therapy-speak, they fell victim to the natural ‘resistance’ that we all experience.
So what is it that people should be talking about in therapy, particularly in analysis? The answer is everything and nothing in particular.
Freud’s fundamental rule, which is still applied to this day, is to talk about whatever comes to mind without criticizing or censoring what you say.
Freud said it should be like the experience of sitting in a moving train, looking out the window and describing the changing landscape to the person who is with you, in this case the therapist. This is a powerful analogy because not only does it get across the notion of speaking about the first thing that one ‘sees’, i.e. whatever comes to mind. But it also gets across the equally powerful notion that the client must be free to speak about the next thing that follows on from this. So it is a stream of pictures or ideas that are being described, in no particular order, with no particular agenda.
This form of therapeutic approach is known as free association. It shifts people away from feeling obliged to talk simply about the symptom that they are trying to get cured. It allows them a freedom to range over whatever ideas come to mind. In that way, insight is gained from viewing many aspects of a person’s life. You will often hear clients say they are amazed at new aspects to their own experiences, ones they had simply never considered, that spring to mind during this process and sometimes in the days following it.
It frees the person up from the often unhealthy grip they have on the issues that are causing them problems - causes are not to be found in the symptoms anyway - and in a very simple way it allows the person the freedom to drop one idea and move to the next, as it arises. For anyone who has been ‘stuck’ on particular issues in their lives, this in itself can be a liberating experience.
It also moves the client away from the unhelpful belief that there is a right and wrong way of undergoing analysis. There is no right or wrong way. As long as you are speaking about yourself, your life, your view of the world you inhabit, your imaginings, dreams, fantasies, fears, hopes, memories, ideas and ambitions then you are doing it correctly.
Clients can often feel they have to work on an idea until it is sucked dry in order to understand it and draw out everything from it that will bring them insight. But this is not the case because not every idea has a discernible nugget of truth in it. Free association allows the search to go on in a natural, more unhindered way until an idea that does contain some form of meaning for the client presents itself. If it has meaning in it, it will provide a rich seam of further ideas. If not, it won’t and so we move on.
Allowing oneself to speak without self-censorship and allowing oneself to tap into the never-ending possibilities that language offers is a kind of freedom that most of us don’t get the chance to experience in our daily lives. You could say it's freedom of speech but not as we know it.

•The next blog will be posted on Tuesday, January 13, 2009.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

How Can Talk Change Anything?

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

A client once asked me ‘How can talking change anything? I mean, it’s only words isn’t it?’ I remember being a little knocked back by the question. It was a bit like asking a baker why he uses flour to make bread. It was so obvious it took me by surprise.
Or maybe it was because behind the question I could sense that this particular client had reservations about being in therapy in the first place, which turned out to be the case. But even so, they had posed an interesting and challenging question. Can talking make a difference? I’ve thought about it a lot since it came up.
If I could replay the situation I’d probably say something like ‘words are the only things we have to change our ideas about ourselves’. That might sound a little pompous or profound but it’s not meant to be. Words are the carriers of our thoughts, our feelings, our wishes, passions, dreams, ambitions, fears. They are the things that allow us illuminate what would otherwise be a very dark world, a kind of darkness in which very little of what we humans need to survive would be available to us. I’m thinking of comfort, hope, understanding, community, inner strength, and certainly love.
Sometimes words even shape who we become in life. Consider comments that significant people have made to you at formative times in your life, using words that have stayed with you for a long, long time. For good or bad, words linger and become part of our mental landscape so that they are as much a part of our personalities as our accent or our laughter or our turn of phrase.
We sometimes take for granted in our noisy world of multi-media outpourings how potent language can be. We also overlook the fact that we are in a sense forged by words; first by the words of our parents when we are helpless infants and later by our own choice of speech and language. The very way we structure an idea that we communicate in words indicates how we feel about it.
That’s why psychoanalytic psychotherapy focuses on words. It is a talking cure. It is the job of the analyst to listen in a way that most other people in your life don’t listen. And because words are so rich with meaning it is possible to tell the same story many times to an analyst and each time it comes out slightly different so that something new is revealed.
Because of this richness the analyst, unlike a friend or family member, never gets tired listening to your story and is always concentrating on the key words that signify what might be going on for you behind the depression or the anxiety or the sexual inhibitions or whatever it happens to be. And these are the things that are explored and questioned and interpreted: words. The business of listening is not magic or mysticism; it is a science that is taught and an art that is learned. For the fifty minutes that you are in session, it is about you and only you and the words with which you choose to tell your story.