Why psychotherapy?

Every person has thoughts or behaviors they would like to change. Everyone faces difficult situations in their lives. Sometimes we want to change a certain behaviour of ours but we don’t even understand why, in a certain situation, we behaved in a certain way. We want to have interpersonal relationships that are productive and rewarding both for us and for the other people we come into contact with. When this does not happen, although we would like to change the situation, sometimes we are not sure where to start.

This is the value that psychotherapy brings: it allows us to understand our own behaviors and thoughts, it gives us the opportunity to improve relationships with the significant people in our lives, it frees us from the disappointment, frustration and stress caused by wanting to change something in your life without knowing how, and it ultimately allows us to take action to increase our satisfaction with our own lives.

The psychotherapy I practice is Adlerian psychotherapy, based on the ideas and philosophy of Alfred Adler, an Austrian psychiatrist who also worked closely with Freud for a time (along with CG Jung).

Adler and Jung are considered Freud’s first and most important dissident collaborators. Despite his immense contributions to the theory and practice of psychology and psychotherapy, Freud has been intensely criticized for his over-emphasis on sexuality and primal instincts. Since Adler and Jung, new theories of personality have been developed, theories that agreed with Freud about the importance of childhood events but placed less emphasis on the sexual side of the individual. These theorists came to be known initially as neo-Freudians. Another element that distinguishes them from Freud is a holistic approach to personality development, in which elements such as social environment, culture and relationships with others are taken into account.

Neofreudians or neo-Adlerians?

Among the theorists who have contributed significantly to the study of personality, four notable personalities stand out.

Alfred Adler

Adler was the first to develop a social psychodynamic theory, emphasizing the importance of social connections in a person’s life and viewing child development as a progression through stages of interaction with others, rather than a progression from one sexual stage to another, as Freud proposed.

Adler founded the school of individual psychology with the central idea of the individual’s need to compensate for feelings of inferiority.

It is Adler who proposes the term “inferiority complex”, referring to a person’s feeling that he or she is not good enough and does not meet the standards of others or society. Many of Adler’s proposed concepts have long since entered popular culture, not just the term “inferiority complex” (another example is the concept of compensation).

Adler also identified the 3 fundamental social tasks that every person must deal with and called them life tasks:

– occupational tasks (career and work),
– social tasks (friendship)
– intimate tasks (finding a partner and building a long-term relationship)

To these 3 tasks, two other Adlerian theorists added, a little later, two more:

– the task of spirituality
– the task of self-actualization

If you noticed on the front page of the practice website that we have included 4 sections of interest, looking at them through the prism of these tasks of life, you will understand that their choice was not accidental (there are 4, not 5, because we have compressed the social and intimate tasks into the section generically called relationships).

Erik Erikson

Erik Erikson proposed another social theory of personality development consisting of 8 stages, each stage representing a conflict or developmental task. Obvious similarities to Adlerian theory can be noted. Unlike Adler, Erikson believed that the individual seeks a sense of competence in all aspects of his life, a goal that can be achieved through the successful resolution of the 8 stages of development.

Carl Jung

Carl Jung also developed a theory of personality, based, however, on the idea of the collective unconscious as the repository of mental patterns common to all people. These “ancestral memories” were called archetypes by Jung, who believed that the symbolism associated with these archetypes appears in various themes and motifs present in both art and people’s dreams.

Another important contribution by Jung is the concept of the person, seen as the mask that people adopt based on personal experiences and the collective unconscious. Jung saw the person as a compromise between what we really are (the Real Self) and what society expects us to be. We hide behind the mask those aspects of our personality deemed undesirable by society.

Karen Horney

Karen Horney was among the first women to work in the field of psychoanalysis. Her theories have as their central concept “unconscious anxiety” which, she believes, arises in early childhood from traumatic experiences such as unmet needs, loneliness or isolation. Horney talks about 3 ways children learn to cope with this anxiety: moving towards people, moving away from people and moving against people.

Horney is also the one who introduced feminism to the field of psychodynamics, contradicting Freud’s view that women suffer from “penis envy”. Horney said that any envy is caused by the greater privileges enjoyed by the male sex and that the differences between men and women are due to cultural rather than biological differences. In my view, this would have been a very rational attitude if Horney had stopped there (and I can admit that Freud really was misogynistic in some ways). But he didn’t, and went further by saying that men suffer from “womb envy” because they are not biologically capable of procreation.

Although initially these continuators of the study of human behavior and personality were called neo-Freudians (as an homage to this remarkable personality in the field of psychology), in recent years many researchers and theorists have expressed the idea that a more appropriate name would be neo-Adlerian, since Adler is perhaps the most influential personality in the field of applied mental health psychology and most likely the one to whom the least credit is given. His ideas have influenced the direction of development of many modern schools of psychology and psychotherapy, some of which have acknowledged his influence (personalities such as Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers) and others have not (Erich Fromm, Beck, Eric Berne, Milton Erickson and others).

While Adler’s theory may seem less compelling at first glance (because it does not contain Freud’s sexuality or Jung’s mythology elements), its value lies first in its high practical applicability and second in its extraordinary ability to integrate scientific theories from seemingly unrelated fields of research. For this reason, Alexander Muller said that Adler’s work can be called a “philosophical anthropology” and has the potential to constitute a “magnetic centre” that attracts and unifies other research disciplines.

What is Adlerian psychotherapy

Adlerian psychotherapy is a psychotherapy of encouragement that urges people to focus on their personal qualities rather than what they (consider to be) flaws. I chose the Adlerian school of psychotherapy because of a personal affinity in terms of the psychological and philosophical principles and model on which it is based, but also because Adlerian therapy allows for a great deal of flexibility in terms of the therapeutic methods and techniques that can be used in working with patients.

Adlerian psychotherapy is a school of psychotherapy that distinguishes itself from other approaches in that it privates the person in the context in which they live their life. Relationships with other people and the person’s place in the world are of great interest to Adlerian psychotherapy. Adlerian theory sees people as socially motivated beings with purposeful, conscious and goal-directed behaviour.

The conscious is seen as having supremacy within the psychic apparatus. The unconscious is present and acting in turn, but any careful investigation of a behavior brings goals into the conscious plane and thus the unconscious loses the power to dominate the individual’s life.

Adlerian theory recognizes the importance of internal factors such as personal values, beliefs, goals and perception of reality (or apperception – i.e. subjective perception). A person’s inner life (the thoughts, anxieties or questions that every person has) is not ignored but is always connected to what happens outside the person: his actions, the important people in his life, the way he interacts with the world and so on.

Adlerian psychology was named individual by Adler from the Latin “individum”, meaning indivisible. It is therefore not a psychology of the individual, but of the whole. And the whole refers both to the individual person and to the society and world in which he or she lives.

The Adlerian approach to psychotherapy

The Adlerian psychotherapeutic process involves first understanding a phenomenon or situation and only then embarking on the path of change. Throughout psychotherapy the patient is encouraged and supported by the psychotherapist. The patient and the psychotherapist are equally important elements in the therapeutic process and effective psychotherapy cannot take place without the collaboration and commitment of both participants.

Adlerian believes that who we are depends more on how we interpret our experiences than on the experiences themselves (an idea later taken up by Victor Frankl). Therefore, identifying and reframing these interpretations is an important part of Adlerian therapy. If you’ve heard of reframing before, that’s what this mechanism refers to, and it’s not a concept invented by neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) but by the Adlerians. I mention this detail because of the popularity of this pseudo-orientation, not because I consider NLP to be a valid school of therapy, for several reasons that I may elaborate on at some point.

Adler believed that people have an ideal self-image towards which they strive (the Ideal Self) and attempted to capture how they strive towards this perfect image by examining their goals (conscious or unconscious). The way people tend towards the Ideal Self is called by Adler the Lifestyle and is formed in childhood years but can also be affected or modified by later events.

Adlerians emphasize social interest and a sense of community and consider these to be signs of mental health. When people feel connected to each other and are engaged in shared, healthy activities, feelings of inferiority decrease.

Adlerian therapy begins by examining the individual’s lifestyle and identifying misconceptions and unconstructive goals. The patient is then re-educated towards a stronger sense of belonging and increased social interest. Adlerian therapists encourage self-awareness, question misconceptions and guide the patient towards social engagement and life tasks.

Adlerians believe that humans are fundamentally creative and empowered to make decisions about their own lives, neither victims of biology nor of personal history.

How I view Adlerian psychotherapy

I see psychotherapy in general as an essential service in the proper functioning of a society and believe that all people should, at least once in their lives, experience psychotherapy. I believe that people are born perfectly adapted to what they have to achieve in life but later on different events, life situations and interactions with other people come to modify and often alter this structure.

During the course of life people have experiences from which they draw a series of conclusions, conclusions that lead to the emergence of ideas and beliefs and these lead to a series of behaviours.

I understand psychotherapy as a method of removing this excess so that the person can find themselves. I don’t believe in the idea of personal development because I believe that people are not born imperfect or incomplete, nor do they lose themselves as they get older. But I do believe that their ideas and beliefs keep accumulating until they can no longer see themselves among so many ideas and preconceptions. That’s why I believe that psychotherapy should not look for what people lack, but should get rid of what they need (or no longer use).

I understand the ultimate goal of psychotherapy as re-finding oneself, not self-discovery. Because when we are children, we all know who we are. We begin to forget when, from all sides, we hear criticism. When you are told for a long time that you are:

– too lazy
– too fat
– too loud
– too brash
– too thin
– too tall
– too sensitive
– too tough
– too quiet
– too talkative
– too country

you eventually begin to wonder if that’s what you really are. And the more you wonder, the more you forget that you’ve always known who you are. That’s what psychotherapy is supposed to do, remind you of who you are, not force you into a stereotype. And then, armed with this rediscovered strength, you can begin to live the life you want.

Remembering who you are is not the only purpose of psychotherapy but I believe it should be an essential one. Because the ultimate goal of any therapeutic process is not just for the patient to feel better (that’s just a first step), it’s not for the therapist to get to the point where they don’t know how to help the patient (that’s the end of the therapist’s competence, not the therapy), it’s not for the patient to keep coming back to therapy for years (that’s called a co-dependent relationship, not a therapeutic one).

The therapeutic process is truly over when the patient no longer needs the therapist. And he no longer needs the therapist not because he no longer has difficult situations in his life (because all people do) but because he is now able to cope with them adequately, without the assistance of someone else. And this ability to cope with the situations that confront you in life can only come from within, from what is the essence of your being. And the essence of your being is always strong and bright, you just have to let it breathe by letting go of all the ideas that are suffocating it. And if you doubt that now (thinking perhaps that you are a soft essence exception) the pleasure of discovering that you were not right will be all the greater.