Change and the Inventing of the Future

    The latest International Media conveys the mess that the European Union is lately going through and taking the Ukraine with it. The strange thing is the signs of decay in the structure of the Union while the attempts to revitalize it is by adding new members. This exposed the point of its weakness: development with no planned or defined future. To make it short: development implies-implicitly- creating a new and better future. When I look at Europe now it is clearly with no plan for its future. To clarify what this means I go back to psychoanalysis. 

    It took me more than two decades of decent work to notice that the change psychoanalysis achieves comes as relinquishing few personal 'things'. but also, which is more important, restructuring a few important aspects of the future. Thinking of that over the years and revisiting back some outstanding psychoanalyses (I did) I came to realize that the success of psychoanalysis has to be by doing a decent work in reconstructing the past, because this reconstruction is- in fact- the main achievement that the analyst will participate in with the patient.  

     A clinical case is a better way to exemplify the work of linking the past with the present and future of the patient.

    

    The patient was a young twenty-one years old. He was ruminating about suicide "all the time" as long as he was awake. He did not try it but could not think of any other things if he were not involved in something he is doing. He clarified that his obsession with suicide is linked to his father' death that happened several years ago, and he heard once that it was 'possibly' suicide. The patient is the grandson of a successful, rich, powerful, highly respected, businessman who was also the head of a small ethnic population that socialized in repairing and dealing with watches and clocks. The head of the family had all four of his sons in his expanding business. The patient's father was the youngest and hated his life as repair man but secretly.  He insisted on making his son seek a professional career. That was a secret which they both kept from the grandfather.

We reached a phase in the working through in which he became aware of issue like unconsciously he becomes someone else (identification), his preoccupation with sluiced was expressing other wishes pertaining to his relationship with his father, bur suddenly (few sessions) his grandfather took the stage. It seems that having more grandchildren than children, age, changes in the business lessened that man's grip on the family. Despite that, the patient remained captive of his Suicidal Obsession. Gradual construction of the material introduced to the patient a sense of freedom to make his choices without an obligation to please (family motto). It was reconstruction that revealed to the patient a picture of possibilities, with or without the approval of others. He terminated. 

Several or maybe many years later He came to visit. After ending his analysis, he was able to get some money from his mother and move to a far continent under the pretext of exploring possibilities of business in the same area as his family's. He had a plan to do what his father wanted him to do. He preferred to study, got a degree in education, worked as a teacher for a while, studied again and became a school administrator. He left his analysis with " A desire to be a free person".

He did, because as he said " funny I wanted to be a free person, but I am happy now to be a prisoner of what I wanted to be.  

The point is that success, individual or group, depends on what the analyst helps the patient to discover about the freedom he gains from analysis.

The politician also is supposed to free a society from old 'fixation' as is happening now in Europ. This will be my next part of the issue.