I read an article last year, lamenting that the psychological community had dismissed Freud as a wacko. Well, maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t, but the point was that professionals rarely read much of Freud’s work, simply because most of it was never translated from German.
Like most people, I figured Freud was obsessed with incestuous sex and swayed by the Victorian residue of sexism, as well. Not quite true. Here are seven of Freud’s actual beliefs about therapy:
1. Freud believed that treatment should only occur when there was a good rapport between the client and the professional.
2. He didn’t think the professional should seem overly smart or sensitive, because that creates distance. The professional should be personable, sympathetic, and able to help, but not in the same way as a friend or boss.
3. Freud didn’t advocate psychoanalysis (as it’s known today) for every client. He noted that therapy should be tailored to the client’s individual needs.
4. He did believe that talking things out, using a trained professional as a sounding-board, really helped people see things in perspective.
5. Freud advocated professionals using their intuition whenever necessary, and deviating from any particular theoretical perspective when it could help the client.
6. He proposed that clients should spend as much energy accepting their positive attributes as working to tame the negative ones. As well, he said clients should understand both their impulses and their resistances.
7. He believed that there was no such thing as complete healing. Personally, I think he might have phrased it better. Regardless, he never mentioned that healing (aka “recovery” or “change”) was an eternal process. Rather, he seemed to be implying only that healing may come with scars. Hardly a shocker, that – if we don’t come out of a painful experience a little different than how we went in, either it wasn’t that painful or we didn’t learn much!
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