PSYCHOTHERAPY, ANALYSIS. FOR A RECOGNITION OF DIVERSITY IN CONTINUITY

Abstract

This paper intends to propose some reflections on the meanings and differences between psychotherapy and analysis from an Adlerian psychodynamic perspective, despite the continuity of the processes of care, transformation and change. The work starts from the historical-cultural and normative differences that accompanied the definition of the professional figures of analyst and psychotherapist, and also deepens the social dimension attributed to them, and then delves into the search for a different sense between psychotherapy and analysis. On the one hand, the psychotherapist, whose task of welcoming and treating the patient's suffering, and often psychopathology, is directed and socially oriented to the search for a new condition of adaptive equilibrium in which patient’s life takes on (more) sense, towards the redefinition of a meaning of life in the face of the suffering that threatens its meaning. On the other hand, the analyst, whose task of knowing and accompanying the patient's world is projected into an existential exploration-knowledge that tends to be infinite, up to the point of contemplating, alongside religion and philosophy, the meaning of death. Specificity of the analysis would therefore be not so much a difference in the technique of conducting the sessions - as for a long time there has been debate in the psychoanalytic world regarding the interpretation of transference - but its intention to accompany the analysand in the face of the radical limit of the sense of life, in an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable, the vital drive and the awareness of death.
The process of encouragement, in the analytic dimension, can be led up to the possibility of courageously staying within the limits of the finitude of our life, without it losing its meaning. Here we can place the full significance of Adler's vital tasks