Helping My Patients Find New Spontaneous Ways of Responding Emotionally: A 30-Year Long Journey as a Psychoanalyst

I started my journey as a psychoanalyst with the conviction that I had to provide my patients, through interpretation, with explicit information about their instinctual unconscious that they didn’t have access to. Now I think that through words (often using highly metaphorical, poetic language, with its tone and rhythm), patient and analyst coconstruct new forms of relating, that is to say, new forms of mutual regulation of emotions. The aim of therapeutic change is that patients find new, spontaneous forms of reacting emotionally. This change, from the psychoanalysis of suspicion to the psychoanalysis of the secure base from where new regulating strategies are co-constructed, is parallel to the change in values observed at a social level: central values of industrialized society, such as obedience, authority, discipline, etc., are being replaced by values such as authenticity and respect for one’s uniqueness in electronic societies.