[ Forum Central | Contents | Search | Post | Reply | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Howard S. Baker, M.D.
Date: 25 May 1997
Time: 06:30:03
Michael Wetter's posting about transmutting internalization made me think again about some of our terms. Joe Lichtenberg has also wondered about the very name self psychology. What is it that we are trying to accomplish in psychotherapy? It seems to me that we are trying to increase the patient's repertoire of ways that they understand their present circumstances. We all must organize our perceptions and our selves on the basis of existing organizing principles. Certainly constructivist episemology has clarified that what we understand about anything is dependent on how we understand it. The major tools that we have in generating meaning in present experience are our historically based transferences, organizing principles, model scenes, etc. These are stored in long-term memory and recurited into working memory on a continuous basis and we create the meaning of our present experience. Psychotherapy offers patients the opportunity for patients to create more complex, new, and more useful long term memories to be recruited in the future. It seems to me that these new memories (and one could say SKILLS at self-soothing, etc) are what we mean when we use the term intrapsychic structure. I think that there are at least two sources of resistance to this process. One is the dread to repeat and the overwhelming horrible affect that can result if old tramuas are repeated. The other is that the contents of our organizing principles/transferences have multiple consequences that send tenticles into the core of other organizing principles. Changing one may send ripples--or even shock waves--to the others. If some of the others seem vital to sustain self-organization, then there will be resistance to changing the first. Perhaps transmutting internalization is a good term for this process, but then we need to be clear about what we mean when we talk about "structures" and "structure building."