Using one’s own mind: a psychoanalytic perspective

Abstract

As a basic concept, all medical treatments are based on therapeutic relationships. However, in psychiatric clinical practice, as we are dealing with patients who have difficulties in maintaining stable collaborative relationships due to their psychopathology, we need to be especially cautious about this point. For this reason, construction and maintenance of therapeutic relationship are important factors of psychiatrists’ expertise, though those aspects have not been valued rightly in the training of psychiatrists in Japan. As a psychoanalyst who is also continuing psychiatric practice, I would like to give an overview first, of how psychoanalysis is focusing on therapeutic relationship itself as the target of treatment, and then would like assert that the knowledge that psychoanalysis has been cultivating for a long time has the possibilities of providing useful perspectives towards good relationships in the psychiatric practice. In particular, those perspectives include 1) becoming conscious about the setting, 2) understanding the patient by using one’s own mind, 3) touching upon the patient’s feelings by verbal communication and 4) perceiving the patient as a person with his/her own unique history.