New Technique For Self-Analysis (Part 1)

As someone who over the past five years spends 45 minutes nearly everyday on his lounge chair self-analyzing through free-association I have learned quite a few things.  And in truth for this reason alone, I feel I can add something to the discussion of self-analysis.   To start with my tenacity for this process is extremely rare.  In everyone I asked in the psychoanalytic field and came across in psychoanalytic readings, not one other than Freud himself has in my awareness had the discipline to do this self-exploratory process on a daily process.

I am constantly on the look-out and ask around and search articles where clinicians and patients talk about their self-analytic techniques. I always want to learn something and improve my techniques because for me at least, self-analysis is very difficult and tricky.  I am left many times questioning whether I am doing it correctly.  More to speak about it later, but I now feel I have across a novel approach which has made my self-analysis more fruitful.  I mean I know how to do free-association and can observe my brain doing so in a rightful manner, but self-observation upon this is quite tricky.  I’m not sure what to do.  It’s difficult at least for me, to both free-associate and observe the free association at the same time.  I do know Freud explained that a psychoanalyst should listen to his patient in such a way as to let his mind flow freely as if he is looking out the window of a moving train watching the changing landscape go by.  In this way, I take it that both the patient and analyst are practicing free association at the same time—getting as much access into their unconscious as possible.

Returning to the issue of seeking others for guidance in my self-analysis, when you read psychoanalytic texts or books, such as Karen Horney’s Self Analysis, the author makes it like the patient of hers who is performing self-analysis, makes links one after the other.  In my case, this is nowhere the case.  My mind jumps all over the place. I spoke to a close friend of mine and she said this would absolutely be the case. She knows this from her meditative experience.  Her mind would completely jump around when she meditates. She reminded me, as well, that I too experienced this when I meditated. Both of our minds would behave like bowls of spaghetti.  Most of the time this is how it is like when I self-analyze. I can only assume that this is the case for everyone.  Yet, in all my readings where psychoanalysts speak about self-analysis, they talk nothing of this mish-mashed mess or acknowledge it.