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When I started this blog, I had the megalomaniac idea that I would solve the problem of happiness. I wasn’t happy myself, didn’t think therapy was working, I decided to read everything I could on the subject to actually fix this issue once and for all. Needless to say, “for every feather I pulled, a whole chicken came out.” Now, I’m starting the blog again, but I’ll focus solely on sharing my insights about everything I’ve read so far. I have no idea if I’m talking nonsense, feel free to correct anything, but from now on, I’ll just write. Every day, I want to post something new, organize my thoughts, and, in a way, make myself happy just by writing, without worrying about references or formalities, just writing…

I’ve always been accustomed to precise problems. When presenting a thesis on any professional or academic subject, it needed to be solid and, in most cases, irrefutable. The concept had to be correct, the model had to be closed, and the mathematical proof had to confirm the model. A good work, for me, would only be questioned when a new technology was invented or some stroke of geniality somewhere in the world managed to change the foundations from which the initial concepts of the thesis originated. Other than that, there wasn’t much discussion, it was what it was, period.

Then this thing called psychoanalysis appears. I immediately hit a wall when I realized that practically everything is based on empirical studies. One of the first things Freud says in his studies of the unconscious is that psychoanalysis tries to cover a gap in psychology. The scientific methods of psychology advances and manages to show the brain’s interconnections when a patient is experiencing this or that feeling. However, this information has little practical use in a clinical practice. It’s more or less like this: we can put a depressed patient in a brain scanner and identify which areas light up when that person has an anxiety attack. As cool as this information may be, it’s not like we have a mechanism to enter that person’s brain and switch off the active parts. We can’t mechanically eliminate a person’s anxiety crisis.

Psychoanalysis emerges as a way to analyze the unconscious, the patient’s experiences and traumas, with the aim of creating a connection between past events that influence current conditions. Through conversation, we learn about abuses the person may have suffered, limiting beliefs imposed by parents or schools, among other things. Thus, by expanding this person’s self-awareness, we may prevent or even cure symptoms such as the anxiety crises. Now, how do we do all of this? Through conversation… each person presents different symptoms, with completely different experiences that don’t necessarily have any common reference, and practically none of this can be measured or scientifically proven. However, it can be statistically proven that patients who undergo psychoanalysis feels better.

So, we have scientific methods and equipment that show a lot of things but don’t solve the practical conditions. And we have a set of clinical observations that can hardly be scientifically analyzed, but that, demonstrably, can help patients to improve their conditions and even recover from them.

I think what fascinated me about this whole story is precisely that it undermines everything I saw as science. Going deep into psychoanalysis means entering an environment where one person (e.g., Freud) writes a bunch of things about how he thinks something works. Then another person (e.g., Jung) comes along and argues with the first, saying things are not quite like that. Both can be simultaneously right and wrong. In reality, what they did was showcasing the successful cases they both had using their respective methods. And the coolest thing is that, for sure, a third person can still come along and say that the previous two were wrong and that its own method is better. And this never ends. As long as the method works and patients improve, the work is done.

So with this post, let’s give a fresh start to this blog. It will be full of paradoxes, confusion, and things that don’t make much sense but work. With that, let’s see where I’ll end up. If I can’t explain it, at least I’ll try to confuse you😁.