Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

Director of Patient Care Margaret Parish, PhD, talks about psychoanalytic psychotherapy at Austen Riggs. Patients and therapists meet four times a week working together to understand the meanings of symptoms and the sources of pain in the context of the patient’s life.

In the therapy, each person is trying very hard to understand themselves and to allow themselves to be understood by the therapist. This can include understanding their motivations. Often, we think about understanding what's previously unknown or unconscious in their experience that might be motivating their symptoms, actions, or problematic feelings - the things that bring people to Riggs to begin with.

The psychotherapy is trying to focus on those things, trying to understand the person's inner world and trying to help a person to free up the obstacles, free themselves of the obstacles that might be in their way to living the kind of life they want to live.

So they're working with the therapist to understand their past, including their family life, the social context they grew up in, their previous experiences in the world. As they try to move forward, they're trying to understand what happens in the present day, including their work here in the Therapeutic Community Program and with other people.

Sometimes they work directly with their families while they're here. So they're working all the while with their psychotherapist to understand what's happening, what patterns are being repeated, and how they might understand those things, those patterns, those relationships more deeply, including the parts of them that they have previously been unaware of.

So we all do things that we're not aware of for reasons we don't understand. This is true of all human beings. Patients here have run into significant problems in their lives because of this, and they're working with the psychotherapist to understand what's motivated them, how they've gotten there, how to move forward.

Ultimately, each person creates his or her own goals in life in treatment. There's no two treatments here that are the same. Everybody finds his or her own way through.