14 Concepts To Understand Psychoanalysis - Dr Jonathan Shedler

I can't speak to do we or do we not have free will. What I can say with some confidence is there are things that we can do to develop a freer will, freer than before, and that might make all the difference. We can come to know ourselves more fully. Fundamentally, there are things about ourselves and why we do what we do that aren't fully under our control. (wind blows)

For the people who aren't familiar with you, what's your background? Who are you and what do you do?

Uh, I'm a psychologist. I'm a professor of psychology at University of California, San Francisco. Uh, I practice psychoanalytic psychology, which for people who may not know, uh, is based on the understanding that we don't fully know ourselves, that there's such a thing as unconscious mental life, and that we can explore it and understand it and be better for it.

What is unique about that compared with other approaches for psychology?

Yeah. That's a good question. Um, there's been a trend. Uh, so, so first of all, I mean, there's just, just mind-boggling psychological illiteracy in the culture. And, and it's not the fault of... You know, it, it, i- i- it's not the fault of anyone. It's what they're teaching in universities. And, I mean, v- even people who, you know, even people who take university level courses in psychology, um, (laughs) are gonna miss something really important. And the important thing is that over the last 25 to 30 years, the entire field of psychotherapy has really been getting very, very shallow, and there's been, there's been a focus on increasingly brief, increasingly superficial, and increasingly cheap interventions, and they get sold to the public by academic researchers. And I'm not taking shot. I, I am an academic researcher. (laughs) I mean, I'm not, I'm not trying to trash anyone. But they, they get sold to the public as, you know, these are scientific, you know, scientific forms of treatment, they're evidence-based, they're the gold standard, but, but actually they're, they've been getting increasingly superficial. And what I mean by superficial is there's an assumption that, that it can happen very quickly, um, that we can deal with what's on the surface of consciousness, right? So your conscious beliefs and thoughts. Uh, so the focus is very much on managing symptoms and dealing with thoughts and behaviors that are very much on the surface of things rather than the underlying psychology that gives rise to them. The entire tradition that, that I'm part of is, is based on the understanding that, uh, w- we don't fully know our own hearts and minds. Nobody does. It's the nature o- of the human condition. It's rooted in the structure of the brain. We don't fully know ourselves. And, you know, because we don't fully know ourselves, we find ourselves repeating the same kinds of patterns and getting in the sa- into the same kinds of difficulties over and over again in life. And the idea is that by coming to know the parts of ourselves that were previously unknown, uh, that gives us some freedom to be able to do things differently so that we're not doomed to repeating the same patterns over and over.