For four years, from age 13 to 17, I spent three, four, or five days a week at my father’s apartment in the pre-war building in which he lived. The building has a U-shape. The entry to the building from the street was, at the time, a sort of recessed 50-foot-long walkway, one step down from the sidewalk and one step up into the building.
In my 20s, the owners of the building filled in the walkway so no step down and no step up was required. Well into my 40s, when I visited my father, I stumbled leaving his building, my body expecting a step down that hadn’t been there for years. Of course, to leave his building, I would have had to enter it – to walk along that pathway, reminding myself that the entrance had been changed ever so slightly. This reminder, sometimes as little as fifteen minutes earlier, rarely sufficed to prevent my misstep.
Finally, sometime in my late 40s, my cognitive awareness that a change had been made landed in my muscle memory, and I no longer misstepped, except very occasionally.
This experience serves as an apt metaphor for psychoanalysis. People often enter therapy hoping to learn why they do the things they do, why the destructive patterns of behavior that characterize their lives feel so intractable, where they come from, what purposes they serve.
Often, patients are dejected to learn that the answer to those questions, the whys, the hows, rarely make a dent in the whats, in the behaviors, in the patterns. It just isn’t enough to know why you smoke, why you choose partners who are consistently troubling in the same ways, why friendships proceed along the same painful paths, why work fails to bring satisfaction, and so on. We can learn the answers to those questions, the origins of our painful, destructive patterns, but changing them requires something different, something deeper than simple cognitive awareness and knowledge.
To my mind, psychoanalysis and the relationship one forms with one’s analyst provide a safe venue in which one can confront, over and over again, one’s patterns, both in one’s life outside of the consulting room and, more powerfully, within the consulting room, within the relationship with one’s analyst. This is what we clinicians call transference. Just as it took me twenty years to relearn how to exit my father’s building without misstepping, and even today I still sometimes do, a psychoanalysis can, over time, enable one to shift one’s patterns of behavior, one’s patterns of relating, one’s patterns of experiencing.
