Maybe you'll remember treating our son, Bobby, for what you called his "recurrent night terrors." My wife and I followed your advice: We told him we had decided to stay in Atlanta, so that he could go to the same high school for all four years.
In about two months, Bobby's night terrors were down to about one a week. After three months had passed, the suffering our family has endured for more than five years came to an end. Bobby hasn't had another episode since then. He's doing well in school, has friends, and seems quite happy. We all are.
It's sure a pleasure to be freed from the experience that terrorized us all.
Bless you,
John and Rachel Edmonton
AN ANALYST LOOKS BACK AT HIS OWN PSYCHOANALYSIS
Psychoanalysis is unique among approaches to counseling and psychotherapy in that it requires analysts, as a part of their training leading to certification, to undergo psychoanalysis themselves. Not only is this intended to be an educational experience, but it is considered essential to their competence in later professional practice: it is important that they be completely aware of what are called countertransference feelings toward patients. Just as patients develop toward their therapists feelings they had toward significant persons in the past—called transference—the analysts, no less human, do the same. Their relationships with their patients can revive some of the analysts' own conflicts. They will be unable to understand the patient clearly, free from distortions created by their own countertransference tendencies, unless they have come to understand themselves as thoroughly as it is possible to do so by means of their own psychoanalysis.
After undergoing a long and intensive period of personal analysis while in psychoanalytic training, Dr. Tilmann Moser referred to his analysis as "a successful life-saving operation for my soul." He sought relief from depression, caused, he now believes, by a troubled relationship with his parents. He describes his experience in these terms:
Psychoanalysis is a piece of the work of conciliation with one's own origins. The important ability to be implacable, attached to the wrong place in the neurotic unforgivingness toward ... [my] parents, has been freed for aspects of life where it can be used for efforts directed toward social change, the changing of conditions that cause avoidable suffering to countless human beings. The longtime impassable road of affection toward my parents, based on humor, has been re-opened.[[2]]
[[2]] Tilmann Moser, Years of Apprenticeship on the Couch: Fragments of My Psychoanalysis, trans. by Anselm Hollo (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), p. 18.
APPLICATIONS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS