Last night, I felt the Black Dog approaching and fast. Earlier the day, I learned that the Hatmaker killed a deal I was trying to set up between his company, a mutual customer and myself. Obviously I have no idea why he did that, because it is not in his interest. He feels I'm threatening him when I have been trying to get money out of him that is now overdue by fourteen months.
Needless to say that it unsettled me greatly. I spent the whole day thinking it through and only this morning did I realise that the conflict is quite obvious. On the one hand, his behaviour has always been erratic and this particular act is just madness. He is out for revenge and not thinking about any kind of mutual benefit. On the other hand, having just learned about Attribution Errors, I try to explain his behaviour by analysing it and searching for a rational cause. Which I can't find. So I've been experiencing this complete duality. One part of me can see he acts irrationally and he just acts in his self-interest. The other part of me wants to believe that he is right and I am the crazy one and that everything makes sense from his perspective. The one side feels intense shame, because I am not good enough for his 'standards' and the other side can observe the erratic behaviour and they can't be reconciled.
I found this text that describes the process and it matches my own experience:
It is well known within the psychoanalytic community that people require time to integrate insight and apply their new found understanding of themselves to their current life challenges. Freud came upon this understanding after impatiently surging forward to uncover the early conflicts that lay at the root of his client’s then current symptoms by first trying to hypnotize his clients, and then simply explain to them why they suffered from these symptoms. He soon realized that forcing premature insight led to a less than satisfactory, lasting ‘cure’. His clients may have had momentary suppression of symptoms but this was often followed by a return of symptoms, often in some other form. This led him to understand that he could not circumvent an important part of the psychoanalytic process; the affective uncovering, understanding and processing of these early, intensely emotional events, by the now, current more mature ego of the client. It is this moment of insight, reached by the client himself, and not prematurely forced upon him, that is actually measurable by new brain scanning technology.
Cognitive/behavioral therapy, while often having an important role in ‘quickly’ reducing symptoms, may not lead to a more long term ‘cure’. We have only to look at the statistics of return to treatment of clients who undergo rehabilitation for addiction to see this clearly documented. From a psychoanalytic perspective, those suffering from a lack of internal ego structure may temporarily benefit from external structure, but we know that only after extended exposure to external structure will the ego begin to internalize that structure; a prerequisite for a truly successful resolution of symptoms.
