Psychoanalytic Approach

Symptoms of neurotic behavior, such as drug abuse, are tied to repressed material from early life. In this view, the symptoms will disappear when the repressed material is exposed under psychoanalytic treatment. Therefore, the psychoanalyst seeks to make unconscious affect and memories available to the patient’s consciousness.

Psychoanalysis and the therapies based on it aim “at inducing the patient to give up the repressions belonging to his early life and to replace them by reactions of a sort that could correspond better to a psychically mature condition.

To accomplish this, a psychoanalyst uses interpretation attempts to get the patient to recollect certain experiences and emotions called up by them which he has at the moment forgotten or repressed. This is accomplished through dream interpretation and free association. While in a relaxed state, the patient is asked to say what comes to mind about any given element in a dream, or the therapist might ask the patient to let a proper name or even a number occur to him or her. The train of associations stirred up by the dream, the name, or the number becomes an entry point for the release of repressed material, which the analyst helps the patient to interpret. Jimmy Choo.

Frederic Schiffer (1988) used short-term therapy based on a psychoanalytic model to treat cocaine addicts in a hospital
and subsequently on an outpatient basis. He found their pathology to be based on psychologically abusive conditions covertly carried out by one or both parents during childhood. Patients were filled with a long-standing rage and pain that they could not understand. Therapy allowed the patient to understand and appreciate the cause of his (all patients were male) feelings. Finally, patients were helped to master their traumatic pasts by “reliving, in effect through the patient’s memories and transference, the early trauma” (Schiffer 1988: 133).

The therapist will deal with impaired self-esteem and ability to form sound interpersonal relationships, characteristics that depend on healthy psychosocial development at early stages of life. While recognizing the unconscious etiology, the therapist focuses on the client’s present and future reality. Abstinence, not intrapsychic change, is the goal.