The self-processing class and the psychotherapy situation: a comparative study.

Abstract

This paper has introduced the distinction between the usual form of psychoanalytic effort at self-analysis and the communicatively founded approach, which has been termed self-processing. The paper also introduces a new teaching modality that involves the education of professional and nonprofessional individuals in how to engage in private self-processing. The ground rules or frame of the self-processing class have been described in detail. The classroom work includes a self-processing exercise developed primarily by an origination narrator or presenter with the aid of the other participants. The effort usually begins with a dream or other origination narrative, to which the narrator abundantly associates. The search is also made for signs of emotional disturbance--indicators--which include deviant frame impingements by class members. Finally, the stimuli or triggers that have evoked the unconscious processing and material conveyed in the exercise by the presenter are identified and clarified. The frame-related impingements by the instructor are among the most powerful triggers for the class's unconscious processing and responses. The exercise should culminate with a linking of triggers and associated images. In this light, psychotherapy and the self-processing class are compared in terms of their ground rules and role requirements, and especially in regard to the healing powers of each. Therapeutic holding is seen as the primary mode of cure in therapy, while the insightful linking of themes and triggers seems to play the main healing role in a self-processing class. The implications of these observations and ideas for the two healing modalities--therapy and class--and for our understanding of human emotional functioning and information processing are discussed.