Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Quotes

“Freudian notion that people act out what they cannot remember or what they cannot allow themselves to feel. It follows that as long as people are able to enact a dynamic (in this case, most frequently a disavowed dependency or a compulsion to be in control), they do not have to think about why they persistently behave in a particular way. When there are no negative consequences for their behavior, interpretations just roll off them.”
― Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Practitioner's Guide

“Feelings have their own kind of wisdom.”
― Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Practitioner's Guide

“What I mean by this is that it is natural to want to demonstrate our competence, to show our patients that we have something to offer. This inclination can get in the way of maintaining enough reserve to let people make their own discoveries and come up with their own solutions to the problems in their lives.”
― Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Practitioner's Guide

“I see the quintessential task of the clinician as one of coming to know him-or herself sufficiently to be able to register the experience of the other in progressively more profound and also more useful ways. This process begins with our own discomfort at finding ourselves sitting in the chair that has somehow become designated as “the authority”: the person ostensibly in charge of something we haven’t even begun to comprehend. —MARILYN CHARLES (in press)”
― Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Practitioner's Guide

“Many patients are so terrified of emotional intimacy that they are driven over and over again to provoke crises that allow them to distance with impunity (see Hedges, 2000).”
― Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Practitioner's Guide

“Putting out crackers and cheese is reasonable when visitors show up with wine, but not when they arrive with cyanide.”
― Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Practitioner's Guide

“When students are taught psychoanalytic therapy as a prototypical technique from which unfortunate deviations are sometimes required, they quickly notice how inconsistently such an approach actually meets the needs of their clients. Beginning therapists rarely get the reasonably healthy, neurotic-level patients who respond well to strict classical technique. They can easily develop the sense that they are “not doing it right,” that some imagined experienced therapist could have made the conventional approach work for this person. Sometimes they lose patients because they are afraid to be flexible. More often, fortunately, they address their clients’ individual needs with adaptations that are empathic, intuitively sound, and effective. But then they suffer over whether they can safely reveal to a supervisor or classmate what they really did. When beginning therapists feel inhibited about talking openly about what they do, their maturation as therapists is needlessly delayed. Despite the fact that we all need a general sense of what to do (and what not to do) in the role of therapist, and notwithstanding the time-honored principle that one needs to master a discipline thoroughly before deviating from it, the feeling that one is breaking time-honored, incontestable rules is the enemy of developing one’s authentic individual style of working as a therapist.”
― Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Practitioner's Guide

“therapists seem to be seeing more and more people at all socioeconomic levels who are deeply in debt—will be glad to take advantage of a therapist’s willingness to underwrite their self-defeating habits by reducing the fee or “carrying” them for a while. Not only is it not in the therapist’s interest to promote this accommodation, it is not in the client’s interest, either.”
― Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Practitioner's Guide