Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history. (243)
Interpretation
This quote highlights how confronting past relationships can transform them from a source of distress into valuable life lessons.
Norman Doidge's quote emphasizes the process of psychoanalysis in which individuals confront and understand their past relationships. Rather than allowing these memories and experiences to haunt them, patients learn to process these 'ghosts', integrating them into their personal history, which enables them to heal and move forward in their lives. This transformative process allows for personal growth and a healthier present by acknowledging and reframing the past.
In practice
In a therapy session, I reminded my patient of the quote by Norman Doidge to encourage them to view their past relationships as sources of strength rather than burdens.
Analysis helps patients put their unconscious procedural memories and actions into words and into context, so they can better understand them. In the process they plastically retranscribe these procedural memories, so that they become conscious explicit memories, sometimes for the first time, and patients no longer need to "relive" or "reenact" them, especially if they were traumatic.
Nothing speeds brain atrophy more than being immobilized in the same environment.
We must be learning if we are to feel fully alive, and when life, or love, becomes too predictable and it seems like there is little left to learn, we become restless - a protest, perhaps, of the plastic brain when it can no longer perform its essential task.
All of us have worries. We worry because we are intelligent beings. Intelligence predicts, that is its essence; the same intelligence that allows us to plan, hope, imagine, and hypothesize also allows us to worry and anticipate negative outcomes.
But in psychoanalysis there are no unimportant thoughts; there are only thoughts that pretend to be unimportant in order to not be told.
Brains come in different types and they're all normal.
Sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges.
If we think about emotion this way - as outside-in, not inside out - it is possible to understand how some people can have an enormous amount of influence over others. Some of us, after all, are very good at expressiing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us.
People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
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