Psychoanalytic treatment must take account of our unconscious relations to these and their effects, that is, to make the unconscious conscious; without doing so, we will unwittingly remain enveloped in ideology and deadness, without a meaningful life and a rich creativity. What are the unconscious fantasies and symptoms that sustain our presenting problems, that keep us repeating the dissatisfactions we complain about, be those complaints stated to others or not?

 

We come into analysis with our story, our narratives of our lives; yet those are not the stuff of analysis. It is in hearing the story we don't know to tell, whose telling will alter the course of our lives. We find and construct this other "story" by listening for unrecognized gaps and contradictions in our stories; to messages from our dreams - not their overt stories, but those waiting to be decoded; and to our associations to aspects of what we've said, but associations that are outside the story line of the dream's manifest content.  

 

Analysis is not, like therapy and counseling are, about alleviating presenting problems or finding "skills" or "procedures" for that sake. Rather, psychoanalysis aims to access the thus far unknown causes of those problems, at which point we can make choices as to whether to maintain the status quo or, instead, to develop a new way, a creative and transformed way of dealing with causes. It is then in that development that our presenting problems dissolve.

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