A Case for Thinking Psychoanalytically

A Teacher’s Take on Why we Should Think Psychoanalytically

When I was sixteen years old, I beat my father in chess for the very first time. One might assume that I celebrated this major victory — perhaps pounding my chest with my fists and roaring towards the heavens! But instead, I felt dread.

Why?

Well, defeating my father in chess led me to wonder if I was now more strategic than he was, more intelligent, more patient, more capable of hypothetical thinking, and so on.

• What those thoughts led to was the understanding that my father was fallible, imperfect, conquerable, and so on.
• What those thoughts led to was the suspicion that I would soon have to ‘step-up to the plate’, begin making money for our family, start becoming the bread-winner, and prepare for the potential reality of supporting our family.
• And what those thoughts led to was the overwhelming feeling of dread, because I was not sure if I was ready to do so. I was only sixteen and he was in his fifties.

My history as an orphan only intensified this anxiety — an anxiety which felt analogous to losing a parent.

What did this perpetual branching of dreadful thoughts eventually result in?

Well, I felt two contrasting forces pulling me to either play my father again immediately or never ever play chess again. The former would test if my winning was just a fluke (which could thus invalidate my worries), and the latter would allow me to de-emphasize the win — to make it less representational of defeating my father wholistically, and to never validate the source of my dread. We’ll explain the mechanisms behind these reactions in a little bit, but nonetheless, where a surface-level interpretation of my victory would predict joy, a more psychoanalytic lens would reveal the causes that yielded panic.

Let’s try a more common example: Insults.

When someone calls someone else ‘dumb’, what are they really doing?

Are they merely titling someone as unintelligent? Is that all we can interpret from such a moment? Or perhaps we can surmise that the accuser believes intelligence is important, that the accuser believes that their victim needs to hear that they’re unintelligent, and that the accuser believes that they themselves should be the one to insult their victim. Of the latter, we can (and should) ask why they believe that they should be the provider of insults (as opposed to someone else; what gives them the right?), and then plunge even deeper. [1]

Substitute ‘dumbness’ or ‘intelligence’ in the above example for traits like trustworthiness, deceitfulness, attractiveness, repulsiveness, sluttiness, prudishness, helpfulness, and helplessness, or any other quality — and similar questions arise. Behind what we say and do are often springboards loaded with inverse material. I tell my best friend he’s good-looking because I know that he is not convinced of his own attractiveness.

Let’s slide further down the rabbit hole, Alice.

Have you ever had a long, miserable day filled with stress, gotten home, and just when you’re about to insert your key into the door, dropped your keys? I have, and I felt a sudden (and immediately fleeting) ripple of bloodthirsty rage! Whenever I ask this to friends, family members, my students, or my peers, they nod in reflective agreement, often relaying their own reactions to that key drop moment. One even punched the door, busted their hand, had to have it bandaged, and lied to others that they had hurt it in a fight. [2]

Regarding this moment superficially — with no care as to the causal, interrelational, complex and mechanismic factors — one could aptly say: But it’s just keys!

True. Keep that nonsense in mind.

One more mini-example.

One year, one of my 9th graders — let’s call her R — was having a temper tantrum. This paroxysm was triggered by a boy who snapped her pencil in half. [3] She was screaming, cursing, and threatening to kill the student.[4]

Clearly, she had to be removed from class.

But it’s just a pencil! One might say.

And one might be very wrong. In fact, one would be more wrong than right to call that pencil ‘just a pencil’.

I spoke with R after class. After just fifteen minutes, the following was clear: She felt the pencil was her property; it was her tool to 1.) show her intelligence, 2.) prove her autonomy, 3.) get her parents finally ‘off her back’, 4.) differentiate herself from her older brothers who get away with behaviors her parents would never let her do, 5.) symbolize her decision to stop cutting class like her old friend group used to make her do, 6.) create her doodles indicating her interest in becoming a beautician, and so on. That’s what we discussed after school. The pencil was charged with significance of her trying to avoid the many tempting bad decisions all around her, and then somebody — worse, a boy (like her blameless brothers) — cut her off from all of that with a flick of his fingers.

Or, again, one can simply think ‘It’s just a pencil’ and her behavior won’t make sense, and we can punish R — an act that would indirectly invalidate her efforts to improve.

It’s just a pencil. It’s just keys. It’s just a game of chess.

I hope a point is being made.

So then why? Why think complexly, causally, interrelatedly, and mechanismically?

First, it’s often not just a pencil, keys, or game of chess — but rather things charged with significance. Second and equally important is that it’s just too easy to not plunge deeply into why people are doing what they do. We unconsciously classify as quickly as possible — often in less than a half second. [i] If we didn’t and instead broke down every moment to its miniscule details, we would overthink ourselves into incapacitation — what specialists call analysis paralysis. [5] With that extreme being acknowledged, we must admit that we naturally prefer the simplicity of patterns, stereotypes, and easy answers — all of which becomes habit. Because of our predilection for underthinking, we must put in a conscious effort to maintain a truly healthy balance in genuinely experiencing our world. [6] In other words, to exercise our ability to think psychoanalytically we must consciously decide to do so. If we practice thinking psychoanalytically often enough, we can better understand where people are coming from and why they do what they do — ultimately helping us respond more helpfully. We can also better understand our own thoughts and the world within us.

Speaking of the world within us, here’s a metaphor I’ve used to help my students better conceptualize our mental components.

Imagine that the mind is an ocean. Floating above the waves, watching like an eye, is our PERCEPTION scanning the sea below. The waves on the surface — perhaps resembling interlapping images bubbling with information — drifting into and onto one another, are what you can see in your mind. These visible waves are our CONSCIOUS thoughts. The entirety of that surface is thus our CONSCIOUSNESS. Because these waves connect — through what we call ASSOCIATIONS — we can visibly perceive the immediate directions in which a conscious thought can go in the present moment — which allows us to have dynamic, free-flowing conversations. If I find myself thinking about television itself, for example, that thought might directly be associated with one of my favorite shows, Breaking Bad [7] or with entertainment [8] or with technology. [9] (See figure below) Underneath the surface-level waves of our conscious are the vast currents of our UNCONSCIOUS thoughts. Like the conscious waves, the entirety of our UNCONSCIOUSNESS is comprised of interconnected, overlapping, and intertwining currents. They largely create and carry the momentum for the movements of our conscious waves up above on the surface. Now, the deeper down the current — the lower in the depths of the unconscious — the darker it is, and thus the less accessible it is to the ‘eye’ of our perception. In marine biology, this realm is called the Aphotic Zone: the part of the ocean characterized by lightlessness. [10]

Psychoanalysis, therapy, and counseling succeed because they allow us to discuss and thus surface those unconscious currents up from the darkness from which they rarely (if ever) emerge. Few people can speak freely about any of their problematic thoughts, memories, and behaviors. We fear judgement — especially from our friends and family. Yet diving alone can be jarring, unhelpful, and sometimes even counterproductive if we are unprepared to handle what arises from the shadowy depths. That is why therapy is considered by many “a collaborative process — a mutual exploration of yourself.” [ii]

When we are with a psychoanalyst or therapist, however, we are given free rein to dive, to focus below the surface-level of our conscious thoughts, and to know that there is someone there to accept us, to help us face whatever we encounter during that journey. With the help of a therapist, we can not only consciously process the memories of conflicts but confront them and the negative associations they caused, ultimately countering their effect.

Consider it as the difference between scuba diving alone as an amateur in the darkened depths of the ocean OR diving alongside a master who has plunged many other seas. In the former, any shadowy figure teems with threat; in the latter, we navigate with confident assurance. Remember, as we begin to plunge, we not only surface a single conflicted thought that might be buried deeply below, but also the various associations connected to it. [11] What comes to light is infinitely more manageable when we are with someone who is both unconditionally accepting of us and trained to understand how these associations work. Our deep fear of being alone can, for example, be associated with the discomfort we experienced watching our relatives age, which can be tied to the guilt we feel for not prioritizing them enough, which can be tied to other conflicting feelings, thoughts, and memories — like wondering who will take care of us when we age.

In short, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy help us exercise the ability to not be victims of the undercurrents that would otherwise be trapped in the lightless depths of the unconscious, rumbling chaos up into our everyday lives.

At age sixteen, I didn’t consciously understand why I panicked when I beat my father in chess. It took several dropped keys at the end of the work day before I contemplated (and thus vanquished) my disproportionate outrage. And while I’m sure that a smart cookie like my student ‘R’ consciously understood much of her worries, she admitted to me that even she was surprised at how aggressive she became. There’s a reason why she never repeated that behavior, after she spoke to me about its causes.

Once we take a second to grasp what is happening below the waves, it no longer has to command us. In other words, “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and your fate.”

Psychotherapy is especially useful in the case of trauma. Rooted in the Greek word for ‘a wound or defeat’, trauma began as a term for physical harm, only being applied to psychology in the 1890s. Today, it is defined as psychic damage caused by one or more overwhelmingly stressful events that exceed one’s ability to cope, yielding long-term negative consequences.[iii] [12] In the prologue to his 2014 New York Times Bestseller The Body Keeps the Score, Dutch-American psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk (1943 — Present) puts it succinctly: “Trauma, by definition, is unbearable and intolerable.” [iv] If we are to continue my nautical metaphor, trauma could be depicted as deeply buried toxic vortexes [13] influencing the miles of associated thoughts above with its chaotic swirl. This baneful deep-sea whirlpool can twist [14] everything around it, distorting even distant associations to the trauma. This can lead one to have an abundance of triggers, or, contrastly, render one stuck entirely within the trauma. Van der Kolk describes the latter when describing one of his encounters with a group of veterans:

“Whether the trauma had occurred ten years in the past or more than forty, my patients could not bridge the gap between their wartime experiences and their current lives. Somehow the very event that caused them so much pain had also become their sole source of meaning. They felt fully alive only when they were revisiting their traumatic past.” [v]

With this image, we can also comprehend why early childhood trauma is especially adverse. The ‘ocean of our mind’ grows with experience [15] and in a shallow body of water, a toxic spill contaminates a greater portion of the entire body. So too do the “inner toxins” of trauma more harshly pollute a younger mind that is only just starting to organize thoughts and associations — many of them fundamental. [vi] In reviewing those who were traumatized at different ages, van der Kolk and his team “could only conclude that for abused children, the whole world is filled with triggers.”[vii]

Trauma is both the most difficult and most rewarding conflict to ameliorate, as it is, by nature, always still happening. It is “the sum of the event, the experience, and the effect” [viii] and is the “ultimate experience of ‘this will last forever.’” [ix] Traumas are “frozen associations” or a memory that “remains stuck — undigested and raw.” [x] Freud and his mentor, Viennese physician Josef Breuer (1842–1925), similarly described trauma as “act(ing) like a foreign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that still is at work.” [xi]

When reflecting on Dr. Stickgold’s revelations of how dreams consolidate memory based on recency, it is quite easy to understand why we have recurring nightmares in the wake of trauma. [xii] They are always just happening. If our subconscious minds work to consolidate memory with a preference towards recency, where better than that which continues to plague us in the here-and-now?

With practice in thinking psychoanalytically, we get better not only at disentangling our own inner conflicts, but also the psychological mechanisms of those around us. As Jung said, “knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.” [xiii]

I help myself conceptualize Jung’s truth here by relating it to the idea of literacy.

In my experience as an educator, I have come to define ‘literacy’ as the lens or scope through which we observe things. Sharper literacy — like a sharper vision — allows us to better differentiate between individual things. That’s a letter P, not a B or R! Low literacy of physics, for example, might lead one to define gravity as that thing that makes other things fall. A greater literacy would redefine gravity as a force that attracts a body towards a center of greater mass, averaged on Earth as 9.81m/s2. A teacher with low psychoanalytical literacy [16] would look at a student’s reticence during classwork and regard it as deliberate insubordination, while one with a greater psychoanalytical literacy would begin to question the factors that yielded their aberrant quietude. The latter gives us something to work with, the former does not.

And like with any other literacy — whether athletic, artistic, mathematical, financial, scientific, or whatnot — deliberate practice makes us better. So, to sharpen the scope through which we perceive behavior — to allow greater visibility and understanding towards the behaviors we observe around us and the thoughts we perceive within us — we must work hard to strengthen our psychoanalytic literacy.

This has been an excerpt from Chapter One of my Psychology Book ACCEPTANCE: AN ADVENTURE THROUGH PSYCHOLOGY, for which I am currently seeking an agent for representation.

Samuel Armen is an author, educator, podcast host, and activist. Orphaned after Armenia’s Gyumri-Spitak Earthquake in 1988 and adopted by Armenian-Americans based in New York, he makes it his life goal to give back. Currently, he divides his time between his psychology MA at Fordham University, teaching ELA & AP English Language and Composition in the top public high school in Brooklyn, creative writing guest lectures at The Russian Armenian University in Yerevan, teaching and managing an English Creative Writing program (Project Bloom) through the Children of Armenia Fund, uplifting members of his community through digital advocacy, and publishing articles and poetry. Innerversal — his video podcast aiming to make all forms of psychology accessible by fusing it with topics ranging from gut health and education to entrepreneurship and fatherhood — was launched on Spotify in April 2023. It is also available on YouTube.

His writing has appeared in HetQ (June — September 2011), CivilNet (2018), The Showbear Family Circus (Aug. 2020), Dreamers Creative Writing (Nov. 2020), The Raw Art Review (Winter 2020), Hey, I’m Alive Magazine (November 2021), Beyond Words Magazine (February 2022), Wingless Dreamer (February 2022), Allegory Ridge (Spring 2022), Griffel (Spring 2022), Poets Choice (November 2022, January 2023), and Prometheus Dreaming (October 2021, February 2023).

Footnotes:

[1] Why do they believe that they had to be the one to label another as inferiorly intelligent? Perhaps the accuser feels insecure about their own intelligence. Or, more commonly, perhaps the accuser feels insecure about their perceived intelligence — how they believe others regard their intelligence. And then where did that inferiority come from? And we haven’t even touched upon their understanding of what intelligence even means — a topic of endless utility in this scenario (and in our lives).
[2] If it was a fight, the door won. What a total knob he was!
[3] Imagine what penis-centric meanings Freud might derive here!
[4] She actually uttered the words, “I’m going to f***ing kill you.”
[5] The fun, equally rhythmic antithesis of this is extinct by instinct, which is when we hastily or impulsively make a fatal choice.
[6] More on our subconscious tendency to simplify perceptions in chapter 8.
[7] …which then can branch out to healthcare in America or the illegal drug trade.
[8] …which can then branch out to the media in America or the history of film.
[9] …which can then branch out to sustainable energy sources or the fact that sex toys predate the wheel. True story.
[10] As a side-note, I depict tip-of-the-tongue syndrome (or ‘lethologica’) as when we try to reel an unconscious thought up from the undercurrents, but it simply cannot break through the surface. The thought being trapped in that surface-tension is our perception only being able to decipher a faint image of what the thought is. When the thought finally pops out of the water onto the surface of our consciousness, we have successfully remembered that thought.
[11] In his 2017 text, The Boy who was Raised as a Dog, American Psychologist Dr. Bruce Perry (1955 — Present) explains associations neuroscientifically: “If the neural activity caused by the visual image of a fire truck and that caused by the sound of a siren co-occur repetitively, these once-separate neural chains (visual and sound related-neural networks) will create new synaptic connections and become a single, interconnected network.”
[12] When pressed to offer a less metaphor definition of trauma, I chose to describe it as “an event or memory that violates all previous memories too barbarically; an event that devastatingly conflicts against everything else one understands.”
[13] Or ‘vortices’ if you want to be pedantic.
[14] It is perhaps worth mentioning that the derivatives of the proto-indo-european root for trauma — *tere — meant to twist.
[15] This is not to suggest that trauma at an older age is easy. In fact, one can reasonably argue that it violates a once-ordered world that an infant doesn’t yet necessarily possess. What it does suggest, however, is that trauma in childhood often yields a broader range of affects than it would an adult.
[16] Or social literacy or interpersonal intelligence.

Works Cited

[i] Ito, T. A., & Urland, G. R. (2003). Race and gender on the brain: electrocortical measures of attention to the race and gender of multiply categorizable individuals. Journal of personality and social psychology, 85(4), 616.
[ii] A., V. der K. B. (2014). Healing From Trauma: Owning Your Self. In The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma (pp. 205–231). essay, Penguin Books.
[iii] “Trauma Definition”. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Archived from the original on August 5, 2014.
[iv] A., V. der K. B. (2015). Prologue. In The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma (pp. 1–4). essay, Penguin Books.
[v] A., V. der K. B. (2015). Lessons From Vietnam Veterans. In The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma (pp. 8–21). essay, Penguin Books.
[vi] A., V. der K. B. (2014). Filling in the Holes: Creating Structures. In The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma (pp. 298–310). essay, Penguin Books.
[vii] A., V. der K. B. (2014). Getting on the Same Wavelength: Attachment and Attunement. In The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma (pp. 107–124). essay, Penguin Books.
[viii] Wright, S., Liddle, M., & Goodfellow, P. (2016). Young offenders and trauma: experience and impact: a practitioner’s guide.
[ix] A., V. der K. B. (2015). Running For Your Life. In The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma (pp. 51–74). essay, Penguin Books.
[x] A., V. der K. B. (2014). Letting Go of the Past: EMDR. In The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma (pp. 250–264). essay, Penguin Books.
[xi] Breuer, J., & Freud, S. (1893). The physical mechanisms of hysterical phenomena. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.
[xii] Stickgold, R., Malia, A., Maguire, D., Roddenberry, D., & O’Connor, M. (2000). Replaying the game: Hypnagogic images in normals and amnesics. Science, 290(5490), 350–353. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.290.5490.350
[xiii] letter to Kendig B. Cully, 25 September 1931; Letters vol. 1 (1973)