Becoming a psychoanalyst is a long and intense journey, permeated by personal and professional transformation. The training encompasses an extensive workload of theoretical seminars, supervision of clinical cases, and personal analysis, enabling professionals to analyse their future patients.
The analytical function is essentially paradoxical: it traverses the analyst’s unconscious as an instrument to enable the patient’s encounter with their unconscious truth. In 1998, Antonino Ferro said it is no longer possible to think of the analyst as someone who decodes the patient’s discourse secretly and magically, providing a parallel account of the meanings, but as a co-author of the narrative fabric built in session with the creative contribution of both.
The analytical process, which creates both the analyst and the analysand, is a process in which the analysand is not simply the subject of the analytical investigation; the analysand must also be the subject in this investigation, as their self-reflection is fundamental to the work of psychoanalysis.
This makes the path of analysis inexorably surprising and full of possibilities, as the psychic space created opens up for both the pair and each of the participants. Often, Psychoanalysis is called an approach focused on the past; actually, what matters is the past that hasn’t passed. Unexpressed emotions are updated daily, quoting Freud: “They never die; they are buried
alive and come forth later in uglier ways.”
With this, Freud explains that cases of hysteria, depression, anxiety, and sadness are, in fact, symptoms of psychic suffering that start much earlier than the subject may have perceived. They are a conglomerate of painful experiences accumulated throughout life, sometimes overflowing. The analysis process proposes revisiting this path, which is the starting point of an analysis.
Thalita Gabinio – Psychoanalyst and Psychotherapist
