Freud...a challenging psychoanalysis of myself.

The first of many applications of counseling theories to my own life...quite a challenge. This one was particularly challenging because it is difficult to apply Freud's psychosexual stages of development to one's life now.

From a psychoanalytic approach, Freud would have a lot of questions regarding my childhood experiences and psychosexual development. A psychoanalytic therapist would need to gather some more information during an intake session so that he or she could supplement a personal narrative with the given autobiography. He or she may spend a good bit of the time asking me further about my childhood to learn more details about my relationships with my parents and my childhood experiences. The therapist would suggest that my problems with anxiety and depression are directly related to unconscious conflicts. These conflicts may be related to problems that occurred in my childhood, and have been exacerbated by current stressors in my life.
A psychoanalytically oriented therapist would likely suggest that perhaps I did not complete, or regressed to, the oral stage of psychosexual development, resulting in my struggle in forming friendships and relationships. He or she may suggest that because I was not breast-fed, my needs were not met and therefore I never completed the oral stage successfully. In addition, he or she may attribute my nail-biting, an oral fixation, to this conflict, suggesting that I may still be trying to have this need met somehow. If this is the case, I may never be able to resolve this conflict aside from recognizing it.
Upon further observation, one might also suggest that I have an unresolved conflict in the anal stage. In my childhood, there was a conflict between maintaining my dependence on my parents and gaining my own independence and making decisions for myself. With a little encouragement, I made decisions but may have subconsciously felt guilty for making them. Perhaps my parents contradicted themselves in that they encouraged my independence and yet encouraged my dependence on them simultaneously. Therefore, I have spent a lot of my life trying to prove to them that they could be proud of the decisions I have made on my own instead being completely confident in those decisions myself. Not only have I spent most of my life trying to prove that I am a “good” person, but I have strived for perfection as long as I can remember. This involves being “anal retentive” about my possessions and my planning and organization. Sometimes I think that if it appears that I have everything perfectly in order on the outside, then others will think that I do on the inside, too.
Problems with my desire for my father’s approval may have developed as a result of conflicts in the phallic stage of my development. I have sought his approval from a young age, and continue to do so, perhaps more unconsciously than consciously. Not only through achievement, but through other relationships, I have sought to find a man who will love me unconditionally and whom my father will approve of.
In further sessions, a psychoanalytic therapist might spend time encouraging me to bring my unconscious thoughts and motivations to consciousness. This could be accomplished using free association, dream analysis, or other interpretative techniques. The therapist may find that my anxiety increases as a result of talking about my relationship with my parents, and may want to dig deeper into this conflict. He or she may discover that I exhibit defense mechanisms, such as repression or denial, to hide from any negative experience I may have had in my childhood. Maybe there was a traumatic experience (likely more emotional than physical) that I have repressed. I have denied this trauma because I have always believed my relationships with my parents was healthy because they did not physically abuse me or hurt me, but rather were emotionally absent. Perhaps it was my parents that put too much pressure on me to succeed in athletics, music, and school, and not myself. Perhaps in an effort to protect them, I took responsibility for being a perfectionist instead of recognizing that they were responsible for putting so much pressure on me to be successful.
After being extremely active in my childhood and early adolescence, it is possible that I regressed to Freud’s genital stage after reaching college and quitting softball. After I quit softball, I lost most of my desire to participate in activities, and perhaps there arose a conflict in my ability to deal with sexual energy. It is possible that my quitting softball and other activities further exacerbated the conflict with my sexuality because I was no longer investing my sexual energy into activities or even friendships. As a result, I found it difficult to form relationships, and my sexual identity was in question. Additionally, I no longer had the opportunity to compensate for my own limitations using sports, so without softball, I was suddenly faced with my limitations and no other way to compensate for them.
A psychoanalytic therapist would have a field day with dream analysis with me. He or she would learn of the many memorable dream that I have and their content. For example, both my fear of my father and my unconscious guilt may be very clear through a dream I had about waking up with my boyfriend in my bed and my father standing at the end of it with a shotgun pointed towards us. This dream was very telling and anxiety provoking for me, and one could easily understand why. In addition, one could interpret other recurring dreams that I’ve had, such as those in which I am emotionally and/or physically intimate with someone. Perhaps this desire is manifesting itself unconsciously through dreams when I am feeling lonely and isolated in my conscious life.
The thoughts around my friend’s suicide may be interpreted in several different ways. For one, I could be repressing a feeling of guilt in not doing anything that may have prevented A.J.’s death. Am I regressing in my mind back to the last time I spent with A.J. and wishing I had said or done something differently? One might also say that I am experiencing neurotic anxiety, in which case I am afraid that my instincts toward suicide will get out of my control and I, too, might become a victim of suicide. On the other hand, perhaps my thoughts about my friend’s death are serving as an unconscious reminder to live my life to it’s fullest potential or to express my care for others in my life more often.
Short-term goals for my therapy may include first, bringing unconscious thoughts to consciousness in order to recognize developmental and/or current conflicts. This may include bringing to consciousness my thoughts about my early childhood and my relationship with my parents, and my feelings about other relationship’s I’ve had, and about A.J.’s death. In addition, I may realize that perhaps my desire is to regress back a few years to when I was 22 or 23, like my other cohort members, so that I can experience a better college experience than I actually had when I was their age. Further down the line, I may learn to accept my experience when I was their age and how to accept where I am now. I may also spend time learning how to more appropriately compensate for the relationship conflicts with my parents, and how I might be able to control my own mortality, thus reducing my anxiety and fears about my own death. By all means, a “cure” seems pretty impossible, but Freud believed that by bringing all of the unconscious to consciousness, then a cure is in sight. However, as it is, my skepticism in this theory itself may just be another active defense mechanism or evidence of further conflict in the oral, anal, phallic, latency, and/or genital stages of development.