Unlikelihood

Sometimes things don’t change, and they don’t look like changing. Instead, a strong sense of what is possible prevails. It lodges, folded in the contours of statements and beliefs, generalisations and summary judgements, refusals and hesitations. They carry a lot of conviction and some of them probably look admirable.

One feels stuck.

One of Freud’s suggestions, one he felt was fundamental to psychoanalytic treatment, was that analysts “instruct the patient to put himself into a state of quiet, unreflecting self-observation, and to report to us whatever internal perceptions he is able to make—feelings, thoughts, memories—in the order in which they occur to him” (Introductory Lecture XIX, 287).

Furthermore, he suggests that psychoanalysts warn the patient expressly “against giving way to any motive which would lead him to make a selection among these associations or to exclude any of them, whether on the ground that it is too disagreeable or too indiscreet to say, or that it is too unimportant or irrelevant, or that it is nonsensical and need not be said. We urge him always to follow the surface of his consciousness and to leave aside any criticism of what he finds, whatever shape that criticism may take …”