On the History of Psychodynamic Therapy

To understand psychodynamic therapy, it is impossible not to mention Sigmund Freud, who is considered the pioneer of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory and one of the first people to investigate the psychological roots of mental health under the name of today's "talking therapy". It would be best to prepare a separate article about Freud in the future to understand him, but in this article, let's briefly take a look at how this school was born.

Sigmund Freud was a scientist with a neurologist background, born in 1856 in Europe, in Austria, to a family of Jewish origin. Considering that physical symptoms may not only be caused by an organic reason, while working with women who still have somatic symptoms (such as fainting, loss of vision, vomiting), even though they cannot be determined to be biologically disturbed, these symptoms are actually some clues left over from the traumatic parts of their own childhood experiences and trying to get rid of themselves. He discovered that it could. This discovery created a new way of treating those people. Psychoanalytic therapy was born as a "talking cure". Freud argued that human behavior is influenced by one's own childhood experiences and created many theories to understand the self. He discovered the defense mechanisms that people developed to survive in their daily lives, shed light on the stages of human development, the meaning of dreams and many more.

Psychoanalysis and talk therapy emerged while Freud was working with hysteria cases, arguing that what people repressed in their past manifested itself as a symptom and that in order to eliminate this symptom, it was necessary to understand the symptom. In order to understand the symptom, he determined the method of recreating the person's own personal narrative by considering it through many different concepts. He defined this long-term journey as an "excavation work" in which we can understand the layers of personality through the defense mechanisms, inhibitions and self-perception created by a person's personal experiences in childhood. In his work "The Interpretation of Dreams" published in 1899, Freud touched upon the importance and meaning of dreams as a treatment method. This topic was a groundbreaking post for that period.

In psychoanalysis theory, dreams represent wish fulfillment, unconscious desires and conflicts. Dreams contain both apparent and latent meanings. Visible content includes information from the dream as remembered by the dreamer. Latent content represents the repressed, symbolic meaning embedded within the dream. During dream analysis, the person in therapy shares the content of the dream with their therapist. Once specific symbols have been withdrawn from the content, the therapist accompanies the dreamer's associations to facilitate exploration of the repressed material.

Psychoanalytic therapy approaches have become increasingly richer with many important psychoanalysts and theorists who contributed to the theory with Freud and after Freud. Today, while some experts working with psychodynamic therapy focus more on object relations and the role of the mother in early childhood, some experts may focus more on the role of the father. While some focus on the person's narrative through the subject of self, others may work more intensively with the ego. With all this, the common focus of psychodynamic therapies is the subjectivity of the person's association and internal reality in therapy, and the indispensable monitoring and examination of the person's words and subjectivity.