I think it's extremely weird!

Definitely weird. No question about that.

It's weird because

what it's thinking about

what it's addressing

is the nature of being human.

It's addressing the parts that

we don't normally reach.

It's weird because it deals with

stuff that goes on out of the daylight

it's a night-time activity.

It's dreams. It's sexuality.

It's mistakes we make.

It's the world of sexual fantasy.

It's the world of perhaps the dark thoughts,

a spooky world.

It's about the hidden things

the things particularly that you keep

hidden from yourself.

Psychoanalysis is a talking cure

but it would be more correct to ask the question:

'What are psychoanalyses?'

because there are lots of different versions.

What they probably all have in common is that

it's a practice of talking.

One the things that all these psychoanalyses

have in common is an idea of

something called 'the unconscious'.

Sometimes we think about the unconscious

as being some deep reservoir

some place in your head

where things are buried.

Freud once said that he had more

archaeology books than psychology books.

His view was that the mind was structured by layers

like in archaeological digs

and when he was excavating his patients' minds

it was just like an archaeologist digging down

and discovering fragments from a long-lost time.

Now the analyst doesn't work with stones

the fragments he works with are bits of memories,

fantasies, infantile wishes,

and he pieces those together with the analysand

to construct the early history of the analysand

that has become buried

but that still is a foundation of his adult life

and particularly of any symptoms

he might have developed.

So someone might come with a symptom

let's say a problem in sleeping,

a disturbance in their relation to eating,

a sexual practice that they find disturbing,

thoughts that overwhelm them that aren't welcome.

Through talking about these

and through tracing their history

the person might encounter elements

from their own history

perhaps from their family history

and through talking about them,

through articulating them,

there'll be a change to the symptom

there'll be change to that person's life

there'll be a change to that person's

experience of suffering.

Patients ask me when they come in:

'Well is that all we are doing? Just talking?

How is this going to help me with my

panic attack in the supermarket?'

Well, it helps because we assume that

behind the panic attack are some unconscious motives

and language can function like a lift

where words can lift other words and other meanings

from the level of the unconscious

to consciousness.

So, take an example:

A woman had told me that the previous day

she had been cutting roses in her garden.

'Red roses', she said - she emphasised red roses.

So I became alert to this, I asked her

what she thought about red roses.

She said: 'Ah! I remember my father's funeral,

where his second wife threw a red rose

into his grave

as a token of love.'

And at that moment she felt a pang of pain,

a pang of jealousy.

So the word 'rose', an innocent word,

had drawn up from the unconscious

the word 'funeral'

through a chain of associations

and with the word 'funeral'

a whole completely different story was connected

than the original one about cutting roses.

That's how psychoanalysis works.

The Freudian human being

is a human being who

is not in control

of him or herself.

Freud famously said:

'The ego is not master in his own house'.

The house in which the ego lives

is, you could say, it's a haunted house.

You try to be in control of your living space

but you're not.

It's the unconscious that controls us.

Contemporary culture likes to see human beings

as one dimensional:

they're governed by instrumental ends

the search for happiness

for wealth, for success

as if human desire can be reduced to simple objects.

Psychoanalysis, on the contrary,

sees desires as emerging

in the gaps in speech,

in the cracks in what you're saying,

in your mistakes, in your slips of the tongue,

in the failures that you repeat

again and again in life.

If something's been forced into the unconscious

and it tries to come back

as whatever it can express itself as

or however it can manifest itself

then something like a slip of the tongue would be that.

If the unconscious bursts out

in other ways that are more difficult

like you always

you know, you feel violent towards

any woman that you begin to get

attached to or something

then maybe that's going to cause

a lot more problems in your life.

Many psychiatric and cognitive approaches

today to human suffering

see people's symptoms as mistakes,

as errors, as deviations

as maladjustments

with the aim of medical intervention or therapy

being to correct them,

to bring the person back to the norm,

to get rid of their symptoms.

The cognitive approach is that you identify

as it were 'pathological elements' in the mind

and then you have a programme of correction

of those pathological elements

through additional mental work.

Psychoanalysis has a very different approach:

symptoms aren't there to be got rid of,

they're there to be listened to, to be heard

with idea that a symptom isn't a mistake,

a learning error, but rather a clue

to that person's individual truth.