psychoanalytic therapy - Free Association Clinic

Why Your Therapist Sometimes Doesn’t Give Advice

If you’ve found yourself typing “why won’t my therapist give advice” into a search bar, you’re probably not looking for a philosophy lecture. You’re looking for traction. You’re in a situation where the stakes feel real, where the cost of getting it wrong feels high, and where you want someone to simply tell you what you cannot yet tell yourself, whether you should leave, stay, confront, wait, apologize, walk away, stop, start, risk, or protect what you have left.
And then, in the middle of that urgency, you meet a particular kind of response: not a verdict, not a plan, but a question, or a pause, or a shift toward what you are feeling rather than what you “should” do.

That can be infuriating. It can also feel strangely personal, as if the therapist is withholding out of coldness, indifference, or some private need to stay above the mess. In ordinary life, care often arrives packaged as advice, and when we are anxious or exhausted we can experience advice as the most basic form of kindness, because it temporarily releases us from uncertainty.

But existential and psychoanalytic therapy often works from a more skeptical view of help, one that is wary of the quiet kind of control that can hide inside “helping,” and wary too of the idea that psychological change is primarily produced by instruction. Free Association Clinic’s public language makes this orientation plain: the aim is not simply symptom management, but getting to the heart of the matter, in a way that helps you uncover meaning and reclaim what has become elusive in your life. (Free Association Clinic)

So the question is not simply whether your therapist gives advice. The deeper question is what the therapy is trying to protect when it does not, and what it risks when it does, because neutrality is not a gimmick and not a ban on human response. It is a mindset, and like any mindset it can be practiced well or poorly.

A woman gestures with uncertainty while talking to a therapist, with large question marks subtly layered over the background to suggest emotional confusion.

When you want an answer and you get a question

Most people come to therapy at least partly because the mind can become a closed room under pressure. You circle the same argument, you rehearse the same conversation in your head, you reach for the same solution that has failed before, and the repetition itself starts to feel like proof that you are stuck. When you finally bring that stuckness into the room, it is natural to want the therapist to act like an exit sign.

But a good question can do something advice cannot. It can return you to the part of the problem that is genuinely yours, which is not the part where you want the discomfort removed, but the part where you are divided, where you want two incompatible things, where you are trying to preserve love without risking loss, or preserve safety without feeling dead, or preserve self-respect without being alone.

In that sense, the therapist’s restraint is not meant to be passive. It is meant to keep your life in your hands.

If you want the broader frame FAC uses for this kind of work, start here: our approach to existential therapy

Neutrality is not the same as silence

In everyday language, neutrality can sound like a therapist who stays quiet, or a therapist who refuses to react. In classical psychoanalysis, though, neutrality points to something more demanding: an effort to engage without turning the session into an evaluation, without deciding too quickly what is important and what is trivial, what is respectable and what is shameful, what should be emphasized and what should be dismissed.

Freud’s phrase “evenly suspended attention” is useful here because it names a discipline of listening that is not ruled by the therapist’s preferences, impatience, or moral instincts. When neutrality is practiced well, it creates a particular condition in the room: you can say the thing you were bracing for judgment about, and instead of being corrected or steered into a preferred narrative, you are met with a serious kind of attention that makes truth more speakable.

That matters because people rarely hide their truth only out of secrecy. More often they hide because they expect evaluation, or they have learned that being fully honest will cost them love, status, belonging, or dignity. Neutrality is one way the therapist tries to reduce that cost, not by pretending everything is fine, but by refusing to moralize your inner life.

This is also why neutrality cannot be reduced to a rule like “the therapist never gives advice.” Neutrality is not an algorithm. It is a stance that asks a more difficult question, again and again: what is my talking, or my restraint, in service of right now, and is it serving the patient’s freedom, or is it serving my need to be effective, admired, reassuring, or in control.

Neutrality also should not be confused with indifference. A therapist can be engaged, warm, and emotionally present while still refusing to turn the session into a performance for approval, or a lecture on how to live. FAC’s own framing leans toward this kind of human seriousness: someone you can trust, who can stay with the pain of the human condition without turning you into a project. (Free Association Clinic)

Why a therapist may hold back from advice

There are practical reasons a therapist may be cautious about advice, and they have less to do with being mysterious and more to do with what advice can do to the relationship and to your agency.

Advice can be relieving, but it can also be misleading, because it often treats the surface dilemma as the real dilemma. You can ask, “Should I break up?” and receive a plausible answer, while the deeper problem remains untouched: why you choose the people you choose, what you are repeating, what you cannot bear to want, what you cannot tolerate losing, what you call love when it is really fear, what you call independence when it is really withdrawal. Advice may solve the moment while leaving the pattern intact.

Advice can also invite a subtle displacement of responsibility. If you do what the therapist says and it goes badly, the therapy can quietly become a court case. If you do not do what the therapist says, the therapy can quietly become a struggle over authority. Either way, the work gets pulled away from your desire and toward the therapist’s position.

This is where Thompson’s critique of “therapeutic ambition” matters. Therapeutic ambition is not the desire to be helpful. It is the therapist’s belief that they know what is good or bad for you in a way that licenses them to shape you accordingly, which turns help into a form of authorship. The danger is not advice itself. The danger is advice that carries the therapist’s private certainty about who you should be.

Neutrality is one way of refusing that certainty.

A calm and softly lit therapy room scene shows a pen resting on a closed journal, next to a box of tissues and a glass of water on a wooden table.

When advice is offered, it should not replace your responsibility

It is worth saying plainly: sometimes therapists do give advice. Sometimes safety is involved. Sometimes resources are needed. Sometimes a practical obstacle is blocking the work. Sometimes couples therapy or crisis-oriented work requires more structure and more direct intervention than individual depth therapy.
The issue is not whether advice ever appears. The issue is what kind of thing advice is treated as.

In existential and psychoanalytic therapy, advice is not usually seen as the catalyst for change, because lasting change rarely comes from being told what to do. It comes from coming into contact with what you actually want, what you actually fear, what you keep sacrificing, what you keep repeating, and what you keep calling “circumstances” when it is also your own participation in your life.

So when advice is offered in a depth-oriented relationship, it should feel less like instruction and more like a natural expression of helpfulness within a relationship that still refuses to bypass the central task: discovering your own desire and taking responsibility for your choices. In other words, help is allowed, but it is offered in a way that keeps the burden of authorship where it belongs, with you.

If that sounds demanding, it is, and it is also respectful. It assumes you are not a child in need of direction. It assumes you are a person trying to regain contact with yourself.

How this connects to neutrality and “non-judgment”

Many people hear “non-judgmental” and imagine a therapist who approves of everything, or who refuses to have a point of view. Neutrality is not approval. It is not permissiveness. It is an effort to keep the therapist’s evaluative reflex from becoming the governing force in the room, so that the patient’s truth can become clearer rather than immediately organized around what will earn praise or avoid disapproval.

That is why neutrality is bigger than advice. A therapist can give advice and still remain neutral in the relevant sense, if the advice is not carrying moral verdicts and not attempting to form the patient in the therapist’s image. A therapist can also refuse advice and still violate neutrality, if the refusal is used as a power move, or as a way of avoiding real engagement.

The question, again, is not “Did my therapist tell me what to do?” The question is “Is my therapist helping me face my life as mine, without condemnation and without takeover?”

A notepad labeled “Advice” with action steps sits beside another labeled “Thoughts” with introspective questions, symbolizing the contrast between external guidance and inner reflection

A practical check: when neutrality is working, it feels like thinking is possible again

When neutrality is working, many people notice something simple but profound: they start thinking again, in a way that is not just rumination. They become more honest about their motives. They catch themselves repeating patterns earlier. They feel less compelled to perform for approval, including the therapist’s approval. They begin to tolerate uncertainty long enough to find the real problem, rather than prematurely solving a substitute problem.

When neutrality is not working, the room goes dead, or you feel chronically shamed, or you feel emotionally stranded in a way that never becomes meaningful. In those cases, the right move is not to silently endure. The right move is often to say it plainly, in the room, and see what happens.

If you are looking for therapy that takes meaning, honesty, and responsibility seriously, Free Association Clinic offers existential psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, with in-person sessions in San Francisco and telehealth options described across service pages.

Schedule a first session: https://freeassociationclinic.com/contact-us/
Learn about insurance and superbills: https://freeassociationclinic.com/insurance/

How Free Association Clinic approaches this stance

FAC describes its work as existential psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, oriented toward uncovering meaning behind struggles and restoring what can feel lost in life, including passion, love, and joy.

In practice, that means the therapist is not primarily trying to direct your life from the outside; they are trying to stay close enough to your experience, and steady enough in their attention, that you can begin to see what you are doing, what you are avoiding, what you are protecting, and what you are asking of other people without realizing it.

If you want the clinic’s overview pages, use:

how we work / introduction: https://freeassociationclinic.com/introduction/
existential therapy: https://freeassociationclinic.com/existential-therapy/
psychoanalysis therapy: https://freeassociationclinic.com/psychoanalysis-therapy/
our staff: https://freeassociationclinic.com/about-us/

Practical details and insurance

FAC’s insurance page states the clinic is in-network with: Aetna, Blue Shield of California, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Optum / UnitedHealthcare, and Cigna / Evernorth, and also offers superbills for out-of-network reimbursement.

Details: https://freeassociationclinic.com/insurance/

Common questions

Should my therapist ever give advice?
Sometimes, yes, especially for safety, crisis steps, or practical barriers that need to be addressed. The bigger distinction is whether advice is being used to replace your responsibility, or whether it is offered as a human form of help inside a relationship that still returns authorship to you.

Does neutrality mean my therapist has no feelings?
No. Neutrality is not emotional emptiness. It is the effort not to use the therapist’s feelings to steer your life, punish you, rescue you, or recruit you into their values. Therapy can be very human, and it should still feel like someone is with you.

Why is my therapist so quiet?
Sometimes quiet is a way of making room for your experience rather than filling the space with the therapist’s preferences. But quiet should not become a weapon, and neutrality should not require you to endure emotional absence. If the quiet feels abandoning, say so.

How do I know if therapy is working if I am not getting answers?
In depth work, progress often shows up as increased honesty, sharper awareness of your patterns, and a stronger capacity to tolerate uncertainty without collapsing into avoidance or impulsive action. Over time, you find yourself living the same life in a different way, with more self-knowledge and less self-deception.

What if I want a more directive approach?
That is legitimate. Some people want skills-first or structured treatment, and sometimes that is exactly what is needed. Fit matters. A mismatch can feel like failure when it is really a mismatch of method.

Ready to start?

If you are ready to begin, you can request an appointment here

People Pleasing and Losing Yourself

You agree to something you do not want, and what makes it painful is that you can hear yourself consenting as it happens. You say yes with a tone that sounds sincere, because part of you is sincere: you want the other person to stay pleased, you want the relationship to stay stable, and you want the moment to pass without consequence.

Then you are alone and the consequence arrives anyway, not as drama, but as something duller and more corrosive: irritation, dread, a low-grade anger with nowhere obvious to go, followed by the familiar question that is not really a question at all. Why did I do that again?

If you recognize this pattern, you have probably been told to set better boundaries. Sometimes that advice is accurate, but it often feels thin because it is aimed at the surface of the problem; it treats people pleasing as a skill deficit when, for many people, it is closer to a way of existing with other people, a posture toward life that can look like kindness from the outside and feel like self-erasure from the inside.

A woman sits solemnly on a bed holding a white mask, surrounded by crumpled tissues, symbolizing emotional vulnerability and hidden identity.

The private aftermath is the truth of the pattern

People pleasing is usually not the presence of generosity. It is the presence of a bargain.

The bargain is rarely stated out loud, which is part of why it keeps operating. It tends to sound like this: if you are disappointed in me, I am not safe; if you are angry, I have done something wrong; if you withdraw approval, I might lose you; if I ask for what I want, I will be exposed in a way I cannot tolerate. When that bargain is running, the yes is not really about your desire, and it is not even about your values; it is about managing the other person’s reaction so you can keep your footing.

Resentment follows for a simple reason. You are spending your life stabilizing the emotional weather around you, and even when you succeed, you succeed at the cost of disappearing. The anger is not a character flaw; it is often the part of you that still knows you traded yourself away for peace.

When kindness becomes self-loss

There is a version of people pleasing that is simply social intelligence, the ordinary tact of living among others. But the kind that leaves you resentful and unreal tends to have a different texture: it feels compulsory, and it keeps widening until it is no longer confined to a few situations. You begin to notice that you adapt before you think, that you apologize for taking up time or space, that you do not know what you want until you are finally alone, that you can sense what everyone else needs while your own desire feels quiet, distant, or embarrassing.

This is the moment many people say, “I don’t know who I am.” It can sound melodramatic until you take it seriously, at which point it becomes a precise description of what has happened: your life has become organized around being acceptable, and acceptability is not the same as being real.

When kindness becomes self-loss

Authenticity is not a trait, and it is not a hidden object

From an existential psychoanalytic view, authenticity is not a stable personality feature that you either possess or lack, and it is not a pure “true self” waiting underneath your social roles like a buried treasure. Authenticity is a way of existing, which means it is something you appropriate in the middle of real life, and it is something you can lose again and again, especially when you begin living by public opinion, by others’ expectations, and by the quiet tyranny of what you imagine you are supposed to be.

This matters clinically because it changes what you are trying to do. If you keep waiting to discover a ready-made identity, you may never do the harder work of taking up your own life in the presence of other people, where the risks are real and the consequences are not imaginary.

People pleasing is one of the most efficient ways to avoid that work, because if you become what others want, you never have to find out what you want; you can remain socially successful while privately absent.

A woman appears cheerful as she speaks to her reflection in a shattered mirror, which shows a somber expression, illustrating a divide between outward expression and inner truth.

Winnicott’s false self, or the self that keeps the relationship safe

Winnicott gives language that many people recognize immediately once they hear it, because it names the lived experience rather than offering advice. He described a false self that develops when a person learns, often early, that spontaneity is risky, that certain feelings are not welcome, and that the safest way to stay connected is to present what the other person can tolerate.

This false self is not simply “fake.” At its best, it is protective and socially useful; it helps you navigate a world that requires adaptation. In the best of cases, it can be a means by which a more intimate relationship is reached. The trouble begins when the false self becomes your primary way of being, when it stops serving you and starts running you, because then your life becomes a performance built around maintaining connection and avoiding rupture. However, the connection it affords is a catch 22, the relationship might be stable, but it is based on a lack of intimacy. You may look functional and agreeable while feeling internally strained, resentful, empty, or strangely unreal, as if you are living through a socially acceptable version of yourself while something more alive stays hidden, not because it is mystical, but because it has learned it is safer not to appear.

People pleasing often fits this picture with uncomfortable accuracy. It is compliance in the service of attachment, and it is frequently fueled by the fear that if you stop being good, you will stop being loved.

The paradox of being liked

People pleasing is often praised, and that praise can become part of the trap. If everyone experiences you as easy, reasonable, helpful, thoughtful, then the role hardens into identity, and identity becomes a kind of prison because you start defending the image you have created. You become allergic to disappointing people, not only because you fear their anger, but because their disappointment threatens the self you have built to survive.

The paradox is that the more you specialize in being liked, the harder it is to feel known, and the harder it is to feel real. Being liked can function like an invisibility cloak: you avoid conflict, and by avoiding conflict you avoid the moments that require you to take a stand, to state a preference, to risk being misunderstood, to tolerate someone’s frustration, and to remain present anyway.

Why advice fails, and what therapy changes

Most people pleasers already know the advice. They can recite it, sometimes with impressive sophistication. Yet when they attempt to follow it, something inside them reacts as if a boundary is not a sentence but a threat. That reaction is the point. It tells you that the pattern is not maintained by ignorance, but by fear, and fear does not yield to checklists.

Psychoanalytic and existential therapy take seriously that people pleasing often began as adaptation. It may have been how you kept connection, reduced threat, stayed in good standing, or found a place for yourself in a family or culture where approval felt conditional. Even when your current life is safer, the old bargain can remain in force, and the false self can keep doing its job long after it stops protecting you.

Therapy matters here because the problem is relational, and therefore the work has to become relational too. The impulse to be the “good patient,” to make the therapist comfortable, to hide anger, to soften your language, to say what you think is expected, to stay agreeable at the very moment you are not agreeable, is not a distraction from the treatment; it is often the treatment, because it allows the false self to become visible as it is happening, and it allows you to experiment with a different way of being in a relationship where the stakes are real but the goal is not approval.

In existential work, authenticity is not comfort; it is exposure. It is the willingness to let your desire, your anger, your limits, your grief, and your ambivalence be part of the relationship, not because you want conflict, but because a life without that truth is not a life you can actually inhabit.

Learn more about existential therapy: https://freeassociationclinic.com/existential-therapy/
Learn more about psychoanalytic therapy: https://freeassociationclinic.com/psychoanalysis-therapy/

A woman sits in silence at a table while faded, overlapping figures around her appear engaged in conversation, representing isolation amidst social noise.

Starting at Free Association Clinic

If your yes is keeping the peace while your private life fills with resentment, you do not need a more optimized personality. You need a different relationship to fear, guilt, and responsibility, and you need a place where the part of you that has been managing everyone else can stop performing long enough for something more genuine to appear.

Free Association Clinic offers in-person sessions in San Francisco and telehealth across California.

Request an appointment: https://freeassociationclinic.com/contact-us/
How we work / our staff: https://freeassociationclinic.com/about-us/

Insurance and practical logistics

The clinic is in-network with Aetna, Blue Shield of California, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Optum / UnitedHealthcare, and Cigna / Evernorth. If your plan is not listed, out-of-network reimbursement may still apply, and the clinic can provide a superbill.

Learn about insurance and superbills: https://freeassociationclinic.com/insurance/

Consultation: your first session is free if you choose not to continue. If you decide to move forward, payment is discussed during the meeting.

FAQ

Is people pleasing the same as being kind?
No. Kindness can include honesty and limits, and it can tolerate another person’s disappointment. People pleasing is often organized around safety and approval, which is why it can feel like care on the outside while feeling like disappearance on the inside.

Why do I feel resentful after I people please?
Because the relationship stayed calm, but it stayed calm by costing you something. Resentment is often the aftertaste of self-erasure, especially when you agreed out of fear rather than desire.

Why do I feel guilty when I set a boundary?
Because guilt can be the emotional price of breaking an old rule, even when the rule is destroying your life slowly. Guilt does not always mean you harmed someone; sometimes it means you stopped conforming.

Is people pleasing a trauma response?
Sometimes. Sometimes it is a learned adaptation to conditional approval, volatile relationships, or environments where being low-maintenance was the safest role. The label matters less than understanding what your people pleasing protects and what it costs.

What if I don’t even know what I want?
That is common, and it often makes sense. If the false self has been steering for years, desire can go quiet. Therapy can help you recover it without forcing quick answers, and without treating your life like a self-improvement project.

Schedule a first session: https://freeassociationclinic.com/contact-us/

Repetition Compulsion: Why You Keep Repeating the Same Patterns Even With Insight

You can tell the whole story.

You know where it started. You can name the theme. You can predict what you’re about to do next.

And then you do it anyway.

Same relationship, different face. Same shutdown when conflict becomes real. Same overwork until you feel hollow. Same promise that this time will be different, followed by the same quiet collapse.

There is a specific kind of misery in this: your mind has caught up, but your life has not.

Psychoanalysis does not treat this as a simple failure of awareness. Freud’s name for the phenomenon is repetition, and later, repetition compulsion. The point is direct. When something cannot be fully remembered, spoken, or borne as experience, it returns as something you do. Not as a story about the past, but as a pattern that keeps happening now.

A couple in therapy shows emotional strain while a therapist observes, surrounded by repeated, fading images of internal anguish.

Repetition compulsion, when the past returns as the present

Freud noticed that people often do not merely describe what troubles them. They re-create it. The past returns as a choice, a relationship, a reflex in conflict, a predictable collapse, a way of handling need, shame, anger, desire, or dependence.

That return can be humiliating, especially when you can see it coming. It can also be confusing, because it often looks like you are choosing against yourself.

One way to name what is happening is this: repetition compulsion is the person’s tendency to prefer the familiar, even when the familiar hurts, because the familiar is organized. It has rules. It has a role for you. It offers a known price rather than an unknown risk. It feels like home, even if it is painful.

If that sounds too abstract, bring it down to one question. What is the pattern buying you, and what is it helping you avoid?

Insight can become a form of protection

Many people who repeat patterns are not ignorant. They are perceptive. They can track their history. They can offer a sophisticated explanation. They can even say, with eerie accuracy, what they will do next.

Insight matters, but it does not automatically change how you live.

Sometimes insight becomes a shield. If you can explain your pattern, you can keep it at the level of concept, where it cannot touch you. You can turn experience into narration, and narration into control.

This is one reason therapy can become oddly performative in contemporary culture. People arrive with a well-built theory of themselves. They may even be correct. Yet the pattern remains.

Existential therapy does not oppose insight. It simply asks more of it. If insight does not reach your actual life, then it has not yet become truth in the sense that matters.

Learn more about existential therapy: https://freeassociationclinic.com/existential-therapy/

Working through, the slow conversion of understanding into lived conviction

Freud did not only name repetition. He also named what is required to loosen it.

Working through is not a single realization and not a clever technique. It is the clinical and ethical labor of staying with what resists change, repeatedly, until the repetition becomes speakable and therefore negotiable.

This is where psychoanalytic therapy can feel repetitive. That repetition is not an accident. It is the material. You do not simply talk about the pattern. You encounter it as it appears in the way you relate, including the way you relate to the therapist.

Michael Guy Thompson’s writing places the emphasis where it belongs: on the primacy of lived experience and on the fundamental rule as a pledge toward honesty. Not honesty as confession, and not honesty as self-display, but honesty as the refusal to keep curating your inner life for safety, approval, or control.

Working through begins when the pattern is no longer treated as an object you describe and becomes something you can experience, bear, and respond to differently.

Learn more about psychoanalytic therapy: https://freeassociationclinic.com/psychoanalysis-therapy/

A man and woman face away from each other in a tense therapy scene, with ghostly echoes of the man holding his head in distress.

Freedom and evasion, why repetition can feel like fate

It is tempting to describe repetition as something that merely happens to you. That story is comforting, but it is often incomplete.

Existential thought complicates the picture, and makes it more honest. In a way, we do choose our suffering, often outside awareness. Not because we consciously want pain, but because we participate in an arrangement whose costs we already know. The familiar costs can feel safer than the unfamiliar risks.

This is where Sartre’s point matters. Freedom is not a prize at the end of therapy. Freedom is already the condition. The question is what you do with it, and how you evade it.

A repeating pattern often functions as an alibi. It allows the sentence, “This is just how I am,” or “This is what always happens,” which is less terrifying than admitting, “This is what I keep choosing, and I do not yet want to face the alternatives.”

Working through is the process by which that evasion becomes visible, and therefore less automatic.

What changes when repetition becomes an encounter

Therapy becomes useful when repetition moves from something you regret to something you can meet.

Often the first change is not behavioral. It is clarity about cost. The pattern stops being a story you tell well and becomes something you can feel in its consequences, in intimacy, in aliveness, in time, in honesty.

A second change is how anxiety is understood. Anxiety is often treated as a warning that you are doing something wrong. Existential work treats it more soberly. Sometimes anxiety is what rises when you stop relying on an old arrangement and speak about what’s important.

A third change is that the repetition becomes relational and speakable. Psychoanalytic therapy treats the encounter as central. The relationship is not incidental. It is where the unspoken can emerge, and where old dynamics can be recognized instead of acted out.

This is the lived meaning of working through. Insight becomes real when it is no longer merely said, and begins to change what you can bear, what you can admit, and what you can choose.

A calm, concentric spiral made of smooth stones arranged on a sandy surface, evoking order and contemplation.

Starting at Free Association Clinic

Free Association Clinic offers in-person sessions in San Francisco and telehealth across California.

Request an appointment: https://freeassociationclinic.com/contact-us/

Insurance and practical logistics

Insurance details: https://freeassociationclinic.com/insurance/

Consultation: Your first session is free if you choose not to continue. If you decide to move forward, payment is discussed during the meeting.

Common questions

If I already understand my pattern, why am I still stuck?
Insight can describe a pattern. Repetition compulsion is the pattern in motion. Working through is how the motion becomes thinkable, speakable, and changeable.

Does it mean therapy is failing if it feels repetitive?
Not necessarily. Repetition is often the doorway. When therapy feels repetitive, it may be contacting the actual material rather than refining the story about it.

What does working through look like in a session?
Often it looks like staying with the moment you usually escape, the moment you convert into explanation, or the moment you try to control. It looks like naming what is happening now, including what is happening between you and the therapist.

How long does it take to stop repeating patterns?
There is no honest universal timeline. Patterns built over years rarely dissolve on command. Psychoanalytic work aims for durable change rather than quick relief.

Safety note

This article is for general education and is not medical or mental health advice. If you or someone you care about is in immediate danger or crisis, call local emergency services or 988 in the United States.

References

Sigmund Freud, Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (1914)
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)
Michael Guy Thompson, The Fundamental Rule of Psychoanalysis (1998)
Michael Guy Thompson, The Enigma of Honesty: The Fundamental Rule of Psychoanalysis (2001)
Michael Guy Thompson, The Ethic of Honesty: The Fundamental Rule of Psychoanalysis (2004)
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943)

The Personal Relationship in Psychoanalytic Therapy: Thompson on the Demise of the Person

A Reflection on Michael Guy Thompson’s Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis

In psychoanalytic culture, the word personal often arrives with a faint odor of impropriety, as though it names whatever is left over when the real work is finished, or worse, whatever risks contaminating the analytic situation with ordinary human contact. Thompson begins Chapter 10, “The Demise of the Person in the Psychoanalytic Situation,” by naming a fact that is easy to overlook precisely because it is so mundane: person and personal are not standard technical terms in psychoanalytic nomenclature, and when they appear they usually function as offhand labels for what is “non-transferential” and “non-technical,” which is to say, what is easiest to marginalize.

Once the personal is treated as a conceptual remainder, it becomes possible, even virtuous, to define psychoanalysis by what it excludes. Thompson notes that for many analysts, psychoanalysis is distinguished from its more “user-friendly” cousin, psychodynamic psychotherapy, precisely by the absence of personal engagement, as though the analyst’s personhood were a kind of interference to be engineered out of the room. The consequence is not simply a colder atmosphere, but a tighter ontology: contemporary analysts “of virtually all persuasions,” he argues, increasingly reduce the psychoanalytic process to the analysis of transference, resistance, and enactments, and therefore assume that virtually all reactions to the analyst as a person should be treated as transference manifestations, while the analyst’s significant interventions are governed by whichever technical principles their school prescribes.

Thompson’s point is not that personal contact never happens, since every practitioner knows it does, but that entire training cultures have learned to treat such contact as irrelevant, risky, or analytically illegitimate, and therefore something to be avoided or, when unavoidable, promptly converted into an object of interpretation. The personal does not vanish, it is translated, and in that translation the encounter can become strangely airless, technically busy, and existentially empty.

Why “the Person” Can Disappear in Psychoanalysis

If the personal relationship in psychoanalytic therapy is reduced to an obstacle, then “the person” disappears by a kind of conceptual attrition. Thompson is explicit that this tendency cuts across schools that otherwise disagree on almost everything: he includes Kleinian analysts, American ego psychology (often called “classical Freudian” in this context), and many relational analysts among those who “deconstruct the very notion of a person-to-person engagement out of the psychoanalytic process.” What binds these positions together is not a shared theory of mind but a shared reflex, namely the conviction that the analyst’s personhood is best managed by being factored out.

His example is deliberately contemporary and slightly absurd, which is why it lands. He cites a discussion, originating in a Psychoanalytic Psychology article (Maroda, 2007) and later taken up in the New York Times, suggesting that analysts should not treat patients in a home office because it offers “keyholes” into the analyst’s personal life and may “over stimulate and overwhelm” the patient, as though contact with the analyst’s ordinary reality were inherently unsettling or even harmful. Thompson’s parenthetical aside is doing real work here, because it forces the reader to ask what kind of psychoanalytic imagination is operating when knowledge of a therapist’s personal reality is treated as intrinsically traumatic.

What matters is not whether one agrees with the example, but what it reveals about the background assumption: that the patient can only bear the analyst as a screen, and that the analyst’s person, when it appears, is automatically pathogenic. Thompson insists that this attitude is surprisingly recent in the long history of psychoanalytic writing, which is one way of saying that it is not destiny but fashion, and therefore open to critique.

personal relationship in psychoanalytic therapy in a consulting room

When Everything Becomes Transference: The Deconstruction of the Personal

Thompson describes a climate in which the psychoanalytic literature tends to focus so intensely on transference and countertransference, understood as specifically unconscious functions, that analysts are urged to attend above all to projections and their interpretation, while avoiding “interactions of a personal nature” that are implicitly defined as non-interpretive and therefore irrelevant to unconscious process. At first glance this can appear like rigor, an attempt to keep the treatment anchored in what psychoanalysis uniquely knows how to do; yet the rigor contains a peculiar impoverishment, because it quietly assumes that personal contact does not itself belong to the analytic field.

To dramatize the consequence, Thompson returns to a “slave metaphor” and claims that in certain relational formulations both analyst and analysand become “equally enslaved” by their unconsciouses, trapped in an “endless” intersubjective oscillation that tends toward infinite regress. The language is severe because the predicament is severe: once every vestige of the personal relationship has been transformed into transference and countertransference and placed under systematic interpretation, the human encounter no longer functions as a ground from which interpretation emerges, but as a surface upon which technical scrutiny must constantly operate.

From a more traditional angle, he argues, the problem does not disappear, it merely changes costume. If transference is conceived as a rarefied, trance-like regression that places the patient in a one-down position from which they cannot extricate themselves because they are always “in” the transference, then the analysand is implicitly treated as never fully the author of their experience, never fully a proper adult in an I–Thou relationship, but an “effect” of unconscious forces to which only the analyst is privy. One begins to see why some patients, especially thoughtful patients, report that analysis can feel depersonalizing: not because the analyst is unkind, but because the patient’s address is persistently converted into symptom, and the analyst’s response is persistently converted into technique.

Thompson sharpens the critique further by suggesting that transference itself can become a defense, not for the patient, but for the analyst, a way to withdraw from the “realness” of the person in treatment whenever proximity becomes too impacting. In that posture, closeness or informality is not explored as a human event that might matter, but interpreted preemptively as seduction or “transference,” which is another way of saying that the relationship is not allowed to become a relationship except as an object of analysis.

The Unconscious Without a Subject, and the Loss of Agency

It is tempting to say that Thompson is “defending the real relationship,” but the deeper issue is what kind of subject psychoanalysis is willing to recognize. If both parties are framed as governed by unconscious process, and if the only legitimate speech in the room is speech that can be converted into technical categories, then agency becomes difficult to locate without sounding naïve. Thompson’s worry is that psychoanalysis, when it becomes too enamored of its own conceptual apparatus, risks producing an unconscious without a subject, a drama of forces in which no one is answerable and no one can be addressed.

This is why the phrase “author of his or her experience” is so central in his description of what gets lost. To treat the patient as the effect of unconscious forces, and to treat the analyst as the privileged interpreter of those forces, is to generate a relationship that is, in principle, asymmetrical in authority even when it claims to be collaborative, and asymmetrical in personhood even when it claims to be relational. The patient is spoken about, perhaps even empathically, but not necessarily spoken with as a subject whose speech is an address to another subject.

Thompson’s discussion of Greenson helps clarify why this problem persists even when analysts try to reintroduce “the real relationship.” Greenson distinguishes a “real” relationship from transference, yet Thompson notes that such descriptions often emphasize the patient’s experience of the analyst while neglecting the analyst’s relationship with the patient, and because the dyad is not symmetrical, the “correlation between their respective positions is not identical.” What tends to happen, then, is that the patient’s side is described in the language of transference gradations, while the analyst’s side is described in the language of technique, a circumscribed set of behaviors epitomized by interpretive strategies, with countertransference increasingly defined as the totality of the analyst’s experience, including what used to be called “personal” reactions, now subsumed under technical oversight. The personal does not return, it is annexed.

For therapists, this is where Thompson’s critique becomes uncomfortably intimate, because it is not only a theoretical dispute about models, it is a question about what it means to remain a person while occupying a professional role, and whether our theories, however elegant, sometimes function as alibis for avoiding the impact of the other.

psychoanalytic relationship and reflective clinical writing

The Specifically Personal Dimension: Being Oneself Is Not a Technique

A predictable response to the “demise of the person” is to prescribe personhood, to turn genuineness into a technique, self-disclosure into a method, and warmth into a protocol. Thompson is unsparing about this move as well, because it repeats the original problem in a new register. He uses the example of Renik to make the point: even if a clinician insists they are not elevating their personal style into technique, the moment they advocate that manner of working as something all analysts should do, it becomes, by definition, technique, no longer a character trait but an intervention others are instructed to adopt.

Here the argument turns quietly existential, because Thompson is less interested in whether the analyst discloses, converses, or stays silent than in whether the analyst’s way of being is contrived. He writes that the problem with conceptualizing personal engagement as technique is that genuineness requires being true to one’s actual personality traits and behavioral characteristics, and therefore conducting oneself naturally, spontaneously, and “without guile.” In the same passage he names a complaint many patients make, not as a moral accusation but as a phenomenological report: analysts who rigidly conform to classical technique are often experienced as lacking genuineness. Yet the aim of analytic work, he adds, includes increasing the patient’s capacity for genuineness in relation to others and to themselves, which means the analyst cannot plausibly demand from the patient what the analytic situation structurally discourages in the analyst.

This is the paradox that Thompson crystallizes in a line that resists paraphrase: “Being oneself is, by definition, personal.” What follows is equally important for clinicians who want rules, because Thompson refuses them: there cannot be universal standards for how an analyst uses personality in treatment, it cannot be codified, and what counts as personal varies with the analyst, with the patient, with the time of day, with mood, with the phase of work. If this sounds unsatisfying, it is because it denies us the comfort of believing that personhood can be guaranteed by correct technique.

Conversation, Self-Disclosure, and the Question of Genuinenes

If being oneself is not a technique, then the personal relationship in psychoanalytic therapy does not appear as a prescribed behavior so much as it appears as a mode of presence, and Thompson locates its most common manifestation in something deceptively simple: conversation. For the personal relationship to be spontaneous, unpredictable, and authentic, it must be free of contrivance and subterfuge, “a manner of being” that, as he puts it, “comes from the heart.” From there, he notes that spontaneous conversations evolve between analyst and patient, sometimes including self-disclosures but not necessarily, because the point is not disclosure as performance but the recognition that not everything the analyst says should be limited to interpretation, data elicitation, or other technical considerations.

Thompson’s critique becomes especially sharp when he compares how different schools metabolize conversation. Classical analysts, he says, tend to reject it on the grounds that “conversing” has no discernible role in the analytic process, while relational analysts may reduce conversation to a technique, which can be experienced as contrived or manipulative. What is being lost in both cases is not chatter but humanity, because conversation can be restrained by abstinence without being abolished, and its abolition often feels artificial for analysts who are, like Freud and Ferenczi, naturally conversational.

He then gives a clinically recognizable scene that is also, in its own way, philosophical. There are times when patients want to muse about ideas, philosophical, literary, spiritual, and ask their analyst to reciprocate; the analyst may participate without needing to reduce the exchange to transference and analyze it accordingly, and Thompson suspects such extra-analytic exchanges can have a profound impact on both the relationship and the outcome of treatment, even if we cannot determine their effect moment to moment. This is not an argument for informality, but an argument that the medium of psychoanalysis is not interpretation alone, it is speech addressed to another, which is why psychoanalytic relationships cannot finally avoid personal contact, because “conversation is the essence of their professional activities.”

In other words, the personal relationship in psychoanalytic therapy is not a sentimental addition to the method, it is the condition under which the method can remain human.

“entering psychoanalytic therapy and the question of personhood

Character, Virtue, and the Analyst’s Presence

Once the personal is admitted as unavoidable, the question that follows is the one psychoanalytic institutes often prefer not to ask directly: what about the analyst’s character? Thompson insists that the character or person of the analyst is of “critical importance” to how patients experience and benefit from the relationship, and while he acknowledges that this cannot be empirically substantiated, he nonetheless claims, without hedging, that for some analysts the role of character matters more than technique. This is not an anti-technical position, since in the same passage he affirms that technical principles are indispensable, but it is a refusal of the fantasy that technique can substitute for who the analyst is.

He also observes that psychoanalysis has historically pathologized the notion of character, treating it primarily as embedded structures that compromise gratification or adaptation, and he notes that Freud used the term in two distinct ways: occasionally as virtue, more often as psychopathology. In contemporary analytic language, virtue tends to appear only in offhand, non-technical speech, even though in ordinary moral life we still speak of strong character as integrity, courage, honesty, and the like. Thompson’s provocation is that psychoanalysis has no coherent way to speak about these qualities without either moralizing or reducing them to structure, and yet the patient experiences them immediately, long before any interpretation “works.”

This returns us to training, where Thompson makes a claim that is modest in tone but radical in implication. Because character is hard to measure and depends on subjective judgment, institutes have tended to omit it from admissions considerations in the effort to make processes more democratic, and ironically this has allowed the relationship between character and technique to recede into the background. Even if personal virtue cannot be taught, he argues, it can and should be included in curricula, not as an ideal to impose, but as an object of awareness, a way of seeing how frustrations, preferences, limits, and attitudes shape what we call theory and what we call technique.

His conclusion is neither romantic nor permissive. He argues that the capacity to acknowledge a personal relationship with one’s patients, and to engage it freely in a manner that complements the needs of each treatment situation, lends genuineness and authenticity to the relationship, and that this has profound implications not only for how analysis is experienced but even for how technical principles are applied, adding that most analysts know this intuitively even when they do not articulate it.

Conclusion

Thompson’s Chapter 10 can be read as a critique of psychoanalysis at the moment it begins to confuse rigor with evacuation, as though the safest way to practice were to make the analyst disappear behind technique. Yet his argument is not a plea for a new orthodoxy of warmth, nor a demand that analysts disclose more, converse more, or sound more “human” in some standardized way, because the moment one tries to standardize personhood, one has already turned it back into technique. What he insists on, instead, is the simple and difficult claim that psychoanalysis is conducted by persons, not by methods, and that the personal relationship in psychoanalytic therapy is not what happens when the analysis fails, but what makes it possible for analysis to be addressed to someone rather than performed upon them.

At Free Association Clinic, our work in psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy takes seriously the depth of unconscious life while refusing to lose the person in the process. Clinicians interested in a more existentially grounded approach can explore our training program and psychoanalytic training, and prospective patients can contact Free Association Clinic to inquire about treatment.

Source

Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.

Psychoanalysis as an Ethic of Experience: The Sceptic Dimension to Psychoanalysis

Reflections on Michael Guy Thompson’s “The Sceptic Dimension to Psychoanalysis,” in Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis

Many people enter therapy with a hope so quiet it can be mistaken for common sense: that somewhere behind the confusion there is a final account, a settled explanation, a true story that will not change tomorrow, and that the right clinician, armed with the right theory, will be able to pronounce it. Therapists, too, can be tempted by their own version of this hope, which appears as a hunger for the correct technique, the clean formulation, the conceptual mastery that would protect them from being surprised by what a patient says and from being shaken by what the encounter evokes in them.

In Chapter 7 of Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis, Michael Guy Thompson disrupts this mutual fantasy without ridiculing it, and he does so by shifting the ground beneath the clinical conversation. Psychoanalysis, he argues, is best understood as an ethic of experience, not as a technology for manufacturing certainty, and the stance that makes analysis possible is, in a deep sense, sceptical, not in the modern sense of reflexive disbelief, but in the older sense of disciplined inquiry that refuses premature closure (Thompson, 2024).

This sceptic dimension matters in the analytic situation because psychological suffering is often organized around a particular kind of desperation, the desperation to stop experience from moving, to arrest it in a diagnosis, a moral verdict, a story of causality, or a metaphysical explanation that promises relief by promising control. Thompson’s wager is that psychoanalysis does not truly meet this desperation by satisfying it, because satisfaction would simply reinstall the very defence that suffering depends upon; it meets it by creating the conditions under which experience can be endured, thought, and eventually spoken more honestly.

Why Thompson begins with ethics, not technique

Thompson begins his chapter with a claim that can sound oddly anachronistic in a clinical culture that prefers methods, protocols, and outcome measures: psychoanalysis is an ethic, a “moral art” concerned with how one lives, how one bears oneself in the midst of conflict, disappointment, and desire (Thompson, 2024, pp. 117–118). In this framing, ethics is not synonymous with morality. Morality, he notes, pertains to distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad, while ethics, in the Greek sense, concerns the pursuit of a form of happiness whose mark is equanimity, a freedom from mental anguish that does not depend upon eradicating life’s difficulties (Thompson, 2024, pp. 117–118).

Once psychoanalysis is understood this way, the usual clinical questions begin to change their meaning. Symptoms are no longer treated as isolated malfunctions to be corrected by explanation, as though explanation were always the same thing as truth. Symptoms become intelligible as compromises within a life, as strategies of endurance that have become costly, and the analytic task becomes inseparable from an inquiry into the patient’s ethos, the customs of a life, the characteristic ways of thinking and avoiding and relating that both protect and imprison (Thompson, 2024, pp. 117–118).

This is also why Thompson can insist, without romance and without cynicism, that psychoanalysis revolves around work that “succeeds or fails,” because the question is not whether the clinician has produced a brilliant interpretation, but whether the encounter has fostered a transformation in the patient’s relation to experience itself, including the parts of experience that cannot be mastered, cured, or made to disappear (Thompson, 2024).

working through in existential psychoanalysis as a gradual process over time

Scepticism in psychoanalysis as inquiry, not cynicism

In contemporary speech, “skepticism” often implies dismissal, a posture that prides itself on not being taken in, and that treats belief as stupidity. Thompson’s usage is almost the opposite. The sceptic stance he retrieves is not a performance of superiority, but a discipline of open-ended inquiry, an insistence that experience is not to be replaced by a conclusion simply because a conclusion is soothing (Thompson, 2024).

He marks an important historical distinction that is also clinically clarifying. There were sceptics he calls the Academics, preoccupied with epistemological refutation, devoted to proving that certainty is impossible, and thus capable of producing an impressive, sterile negativity that ends in a cul de sac; and there were the Pyrrhonian sceptics, whom he calls the Therapists, who rejected epistemological questions “in principle” and devoted themselves to developing an ethic, a therapeutic method, oriented toward happiness understood as ataraxia, equanimity, freedom from psychic conflict (Thompson, 2024, p. 121; Annas & Barnes, 1994). Where academic knowledge privileges abstraction, these sceptic “therapists” emphasized the here-and-now of immediate experience, and in that emphasis Thompson hears an ancestor of analytic work, not because psychoanalysis repeats antiquity, but because it inherits a practical problem that never disappears: how to live when certainty cannot do the work we demand of it (Thompson, 2024, p. 121; Groarke, 1990).

Burnyeat’s famous question, “Can the sceptic live his scepticism?”, is not merely an academic puzzle from the history of philosophy, because it describes, in another register, the clinical problem of whether one can inhabit a stance of suspended certainty without collapsing into paralysis, despair, or fanaticism (Burnyeat, 1997). Psychoanalysis, at its best, does not answer that question with an argument. It answers by staging a relationship in which the refusal of premature certainty becomes tolerable, and in which the costs of certainty can become visible.

Epoché in therapy, the suspension of judgment as a clinical attitude

The centre of Thompson’s chapter is epoché, the suspension of judgment. The term can easily be misunderstood as a recommendation to become vague, or to “hold space” by refusing thought, or to adopt indifference in the name of neutrality. Thompson means something more exacting and more demanding. Epoché is the capacity to attend to experience as it unfolds, “from one unpredictable moment to the next,” while bracketing the reflex to explain, justify, moralize, or reduce what is happening to an already familiar schema (Thompson, 2024, pp. 121–122).

This suspension is not passive. It requires abandoning theoretical, conceptual, or causal considerations as a first move, not because such considerations are always false, but because they are too often seized as an escape from the shock of experience. It is, in Thompson’s language, an “emptied” mind, a negative capability, a willingness to be with the not-yet-known without forcing it to become knowable on command (Thompson, 2024, p. 122).

Patients tend to recognize, often with ambivalence, why this matters. The rush to certainty, whether it takes the form of self-diagnosis, moral condemnation, or a fixed narrative about one’s history, can function as a way of not having to feel what is being felt, and of not having to admit what is being avoided. The analytic encounter becomes ethically distinctive when it refuses to collaborate with this rush, not by withholding interest, but by insisting that experience be allowed to appear before it is disciplined into a conclusion.

For therapists, epoché is equally unsettling because it deprives the clinician of the fantasy that competence is equivalent to immediate knowing. In this sense, epoché is not simply a technique, it is a posture of humility, a constraint placed on the clinician’s wish to be right, and a safeguard against using theory as a shield. Wachterhauser’s collection on phenomenology and scepticism can be read as a reminder that this problem is perennial: how to keep inquiry open without dissolving into incoherence, and how to hold openness without turning it into dogma (Wachterhauser, 1996).

Neutrality as a sensibility, not a rule, and why that distinction matters

Thompson’s argument becomes clinically concrete when he turns to analytic technique and insists that what is usually taught as “neutrality” is better understood as a cultivated sensibility, an ethos, rather than a rigid method (Thompson, 2024). He is explicit that scepticism and neutrality are not rules to be obeyed mechanically, and that the language of rule-following can itself become antithetical to the analytic attitude, because rules invite a defensive performance rather than a receptive attention (Thompson, 2024).

When Thompson traces neutrality back to Freud, he emphasizes that Freud’s recommendation is not a performance of detachment for its own sake, but an attempt to protect the work from the analyst’s presuppositions. The stance entails making no assumptions, abandoning pretensions to knowledge, letting the patient’s experience determine the course of the work with minimal interference, and cultivating an “evenly-suspended” attention that does not seize selectively upon what confirms the analyst’s expectations (Freud, 1912/1958; Thompson, 2024).

Freud’s language is unambiguous about the discipline involved:

“Thus we are warned against introducing our own expectations into the material. We must allow ourselves to be taken by surprise and always meet the patient with an open mind, free from any presuppositions.”
(Freud, 1912/1958)

If neutrality is misunderstood as coldness, it is often because both patient and therapist feel, in different ways, the anxiety that openness evokes, and they seek protection by turning the encounter into something predictable. Yet neutrality, understood sceptically, is not the refusal of relationship. It is the refusal to coerce the other into one’s own conceptual comfort. It is an ethical gesture toward the patient’s experience, including the aspects of experience that are inconvenient to the clinician’s preferred theory.

psychoanalytic working through resistance in the therapy room “free association and resistance in existential psychoanalysis

Montaigne, Freud, and the ethic implicit in free association

Thompson’s chapter becomes historically vivid when he suggests that the sceptic attitude “insinuated itself” into Freud’s conception of technique, even as Freud sought to secure psychoanalysis within a scientific idiom, and he locates this sceptic inheritance especially in free association and the sensibility of neutrality (Thompson, 2024, p. 128). He is careful about the limits of historical certainty, yet he notes that Freud became acquainted with Montaigne “around the time” Freud’s technique took what Thompson calls “a more sceptical turn,” roughly between 1912 and 1915, and he reads Montaigne’s counsel as an anticipatory version of the analytic attitude (Thompson, 2024, pp. 128–129).

Montaigne’s formulation is worth quoting because it clarifies the ethical seriousness behind what can otherwise sound like a mere method:

“It is an act of love to undertake to wound and offend in order to benefit.”
(Montaigne, 1925, Vol. 4, p. 307)

In a therapeutic culture that often confuses kindness with reassurance, Montaigne’s sentence can feel severe, and it should, because it names a difficulty that patients know intimately: honesty hurts, not because truth is inherently cruel, but because our attachments to belief, to self-image, to fantasy, and to the protection those provide are passionate, tenacious, and often desperate. Thompson pushes the point further by suggesting that the intensity with which we defend our “sacred assumptions” is not merely an intellectual habit, but a root of psychopathology, because such defences organize avoidance and distort relationship (Thompson, 2024, p. 129).

When this is brought into the analytic room, free association ceases to look like a clever technique and begins to appear as an ethical demand placed on speech. It asks the patient to risk saying what is inconvenient, shameful, contradictory, or seemingly senseless, while the analyst risks not knowing in advance where the speech will go or what it will demand from them in return. In that reciprocity, the fundamental question is not whether the right interpretation will be delivered, but whether experience will be allowed to speak without being prematurely silenced by certainty.

When theory becomes an escape from experience

Thompson is not anti-theoretical, and the chapter does not lapse into the familiar anti-intellectual gesture that pretends experience is self-interpreting. His scepticism is aimed elsewhere. It is aimed at the way theory can become a refuge, a way of avoiding the encounter with what is actually happening between two people by replacing it with the comfort of conceptual recognition. The sceptics, he reminds us, rejected rote learning and emphasized immediate experience, and Thompson reads this as a clinical warning: the mastery of theory does not by itself produce the capacity to listen, because listening is not the passive reception of content but an exposure to what is unpredictable, disturbing, and morally consequential (Thompson, 2024, p. 121).

For therapists, this warning cuts against a common training fantasy: that competence is achieved by accumulating knowledge until one is immune to uncertainty. In reality, the analyst’s wish to know can become as defensive as the patient’s wish to know, and the analytic situation becomes distorted when theory is used to stop inquiry rather than to deepen it. At that point, schools of thought can function as shelters from experience, offering certainty as an identity, and certainty as an identity is always tempted by dogmatism.

For patients, the same point is often lived from the inside as a feeling of being reduced. When the clinician rushes to diagnosis or explanation, the patient may feel temporarily understood, but they may also feel quietly erased, as though their living experience has been translated into a concept that is easier for the clinician to handle than the person themselves. Thompson’s sceptic ethic would regard that translation as a danger, because it replaces the person with a theory of the person.

Equanimity, suffering, and the limits of cure

Thompson closes his chapter by returning to the ethical horizon that began it. If psychoanalysis is oriented toward equanimity, then its aim is not the eradication of suffering but a changed relation to suffering, a stance that can remain “unbothered” by suffering in the sense of accepting it as a condition of life rather than as evidence that life is an error (Thompson, 2024, p. 139). He writes, with a directness that is existential rather than consoling, that the truly happy individual is one who can cope with life’s problems without avoiding them, who can “endure the anguish of living without cursing it” (Thompson, 2024, p. 139).

This is where the sceptic lineage becomes something more than historical color. Sextus Empiricus, the physician of scepticism, suggests that if one can remove the intensity of one’s beliefs, one can endure “moderate suffering” (Sextus Empiricus, 1949). This is not a promise of cure, and it is not a minimization of pain. It is a description of how belief, especially dogmatic belief about what must be true, can amplify anguish by turning suffering into a verdict on existence itself.

Freud’s remark about transforming “hysterical misery into common unhappiness” is often repeated as a sign of pessimism, but it can also be heard as a sober ethical claim about the limits of psychotherapy, and about the possibility that a less defended life may suffer more honestly and therefore with less self-imposed cruelty (Freud & Breuer, 1893–1895/1955). Thompson’s sceptic ethic does not celebrate suffering, but it refuses the fantasy that suffering can be abolished without remainder, and it treats the desire for abolition as one more place where the human being tries to escape experience rather than to live it.

Conclusion

Thompson’s “sceptic dimension” is not a call to doubt everything, and it is not an invitation to cultivate vagueness; it is a disciplined refusal to replace experience with certainty, especially when certainty functions as a defence against the discomfort of living and the vulnerability of relationship.

Psychoanalysis, on this view, is ethical not because it preaches morality, but because it concerns the manner by which a person conducts themselves in the face of conflict and disappointment, and because it asks both patient and therapist to endure what is revealed when judgment is suspended long enough for experience to speak (Thompson, 2024).

At Free Association Clinic, this sensibility informs our understanding of psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy as forms of depth work that take experience seriously and resist the urge to substitute slogans for inquiry. For clinicians, our training program in existential psychoanalysis is oriented toward precisely this capacity, the capacity to listen without coercing, to think without retreating into dogma, and to remain receptive in the face of uncertainty. If you want to explore this work as a client or clinician, you can contact us.

References

Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis. Routledge.
Annas, J., & Barnes, J. (1994). Sextus Empiricus: Outlines of Scepticism. Cambridge University Press.
Burnyeat, M. (1997). Can the sceptic live his scepticism? In M. Burnyeat & M. Frede (Eds.), The Original Sceptics: A Controversy. Hackett Publishing.
Freud, S. (1912/1958). Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psychoanalysis. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12). Hogarth Press.
Freud, S., & Breuer, J. (1893-1895/1955). Studies on Hysteria. In Standard Edition (Vol. 2). Hogarth Press.
Groarke, L. (1990). Greek Scepticism: Anti-Realist Trends in Ancient Thought. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Montaigne, M. (1925). The Essays of Montaigne (G. B. Ives, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Sextus Empiricus. (1949). Adversus Mathematicus (R. G. Bury, Trans.). Loeb Classical Library, Heinemann.
Wachterhauser, B. (1996). Phenomenology and Scepticism: Essays in Honor of James M. Edie. Northwestern University Press.

Will and Desire in Existential Psychoanalysis: Rethinking Willpower in Therapy

A Reflection on Michael Guy Thompson’s Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis

Most of us have tried to change something about ourselves through sheer effort. We make a plan, set a rule, tighten our grip, and then watch ourselves do the very thing we swore we would not do.

It is easy to call this “a lack of willpower.” It is also easy to feel ashamed when willpower does not deliver.

In Chapter 4 of Michael Guy Thompson’s Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis, the question becomes more interesting, and more clinically useful. When we look closely at will and desire in existential psychoanalysis, “the will” is not simply the engine of change. Often it is the strategy we use to keep desire contained, especially when desire feels risky

The familiar proverb, and the hidden question behind it

“Where there is a will there is a way” sounds comforting. It suggests that a strong enough inner force can override fear, conflict, and ambivalence.

Thompson opens the chapter by quietly challenging that assumption. The proverb is not exactly wrong, but it hides a deeper question: what do we mean when we say “will” in the first place?

Because in actual human life, will is rarely just a clean, rational lever. It carries mood, morality, and history. It can sound like duty. It can sound like threat. It can also sound like a parent’s voice that we have learned to speak to ourselves with.

For people seeking therapy, this matters. Many forms of suffering come with an exhausting internal dialogue: I should be different. I need to be better. I have to get control.

Will as virtue, will as “free choice,” and why this history still matters

Part of Thompson’s point is that our modern idea of will did not appear out of nowhere. The “will” has a long philosophical lineage, and it often arrives dressed in moral language.

In very broad strokes, classical ethics tends to link the will to character formation and self-mastery. Religious philosophy tends to link the will to responsibility, temptation, and virtue. Even if we have never read Aristotle or Augustine, many of us have inherited a worldview where willpower is treated as proof of goodness, and failure of will is treated as a personal flaw.

In therapy, those inherited meanings show up as guilt and self-judgment. People do not simply want to change. They often feel they must change in order to deserve care, belonging, or respect.

Existential psychoanalysis does not dismiss responsibility. But it is suspicious of the way “responsibility” becomes a weapon turned inward.

will and desire in existential psychoanalysis, choice and risk

Schopenhauer, and the will we cannot simply command

Thompson turns to Schopenhauer for a remark that lands with a kind of cold clarity: “You can do as you will, but you cannot will as you will.”

It is a short sentence, but it reorganizes the problem. We may be able to force certain behaviors, at least for a while. But we cannot simply choose what we want, or stop wanting what we want, by issuing ourselves a command.

Schopenhauer’s view pushes the will down below the level of conscious intention. The will becomes something more like an underlying drive, closer to desire than to “decision.” If that is true, then “willpower” is not the same as the will. It is more like an executive function, a manager that tries to direct what is already moving.

Clinically, this is one reason a person can “know better” and still repeat the pattern. The knowledge is real. The intention is real. But desire is also real, and it often carries more force than our conscious plans.

Nietzsche and the hunger for a fuller life

Thompson also brings in Nietzsche, especially the riddle of “will to power.” In pop culture, this phrase can sound like domination. But Nietzsche’s point is often closer to vitality than tyranny.

If Schopenhauer emphasizes the way desire operates beneath the self’s proud claims, Nietzsche emphasizes the way desire moves toward intensity, toward aliveness, toward a more fully lived existence.

In therapy, this can be a helpful reframe. Sometimes the “problem behavior” is not merely a failure of control. Sometimes it is a distorted attempt to recover feeling, to break through numbness, to escape the flatness of life lived only through duty.

That does not make every desire wise. But it does remind us that desire is often the place where the person is trying to live.

Why “trying harder” can work, and why it often does not

Modern psychotherapy has many approaches that treat change as a function of volition. In the best versions, this is not simplistic. It can be deeply compassionate. It helps people identify patterns, practice skills, and build stability.

It can also work, especially when someone needs structure, containment, or immediate relief.

Thompson’s critique is not that volition is useless. It is that volition becomes misleading when it is treated as the core of psychic change. A willpower model tends to imagine the self as a commander standing above desire.

Existential psychoanalysis leans in a different direction. It asks: what if the “commander” is itself part of the conflict? What if the manager is not neutral, but frightened? What if “control” is sometimes the price we pay to avoid risk?

This is one reason desire and change are so closely linked. Desire almost always implies exposure. It implies the possibility of disappointment. It implies that we cannot fully guarantee the outcome.

willpower vs desire in therapy, finding direction

Laing, Sartre, and the problem of changing because you “should”

Thompson draws on R.D. Laing to make a sharp clinical observation: people often attempt change because they “should,” or because they “need to,” but change becomes durable when they genuinely want it.

Laing’s view, as Thompson presents it, is that our selfhood is located in desire rather than in ego or character traits. In that frame, the will has a limited role, it can synthesize, and it can repress.

This matters in the clinic because “the will” is frequently recruited as a defense.

A clear example in the chapter is addiction, but the point extends beyond substances. Many people try to force themselves out of a pattern using an internal voice of obligation, a kind of “introjected parent” that demands compliance. The person fights their desire while also protecting it. They go back and forth, and the struggle becomes a way of life.

Thompson’s deeper point is not moral judgment. It is existential. When we are terrified of the pain that desire brings, we will do almost anything to silence it.

When the will suppresses the pain of desire

Near the end of the chapter, Thompson offers a line that is easy to recognize if you have ever been stuck in a high-functioning version of suffering.

Sometimes the will is what remains when desire has gone quiet. A person can keep going, keep performing, keep achieving, all while feeling that something essential has been buried.

In that condition, willpower can look impressive from the outside. It can lead to success. It can also produce a life that feels strangely empty.

Thompson notes another uncomfortable truth: you do not always need a substance to reduce anxiety. The will can do it. You can tighten down, numb out, and survive. The cost is that desire, which often requires risk, gets treated as dangerous.

When will and desire are at cross purposes, will often wins, at least in the short run. But the victory is rarely satisfying.

And there is a further twist: the will frequently resists change. If the will has become the tool we use to stay safe, it is not eager to surrender its job.

existential psychoanalysis and the role of desire in change

Conclusion

One of Thompson’s most clinically useful suggestions in Chapter 4 is that meaningful change often arrives indirectly. Genuine change comes when we want to change, not because we should, and not because we are trying to force ourselves into compliance.

The function of therapy, in this view, is not to shout louder instructions at the self. It is to use reflection, a form of will, to examine why we repeatedly obstruct our own desire, and to put those defenses into question. We cannot simply will ourselves to drop our defenses, but sustained inquiry can loosen what once seemed rigid.

If you find yourself stuck between duty and desire, or caught in cycles of self-control followed by collapse, this is the kind of work we explore in depth at Free Association Clinic through both psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy. Clinicians in training who want to engage these questions clinically can also learn more about our training program. To begin a conversation, you can contact Free Association Clinic.

James Norwood, PsyD
Associate Director, New School for Existential Psychoanalysis (https://www.freeassociation.us)
Clinical Director, The Free Association Clinic for Existential Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (https://www.freeassociationclinic.com)
Founder/CEO, inpersontherapy.com (https://inpersontherapy.com)
Aristotle. (1915). The Works of Aristotle, Vol. IX: Ethica Nicomachea (W. D. Ross, Trans.). Oxford University Press.
Augustine. (2010). Augustine: On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy). Cambridge University Press.
Laing, R. D. (1979). Personal communication.
Nietzsche, F. (2001). Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (J. Norman, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.
Schopenhauer, A. (2012). The World as Will and Representation (E. F. J. Payne, Trans.). Dover Publications.
Thompson, M. G. (1994). The Truth About Freud’s Technique: The Encounter With the Real. New York University Press.
Thompson, M. G. (2020). Existential psychoanalysis: The role of freedom in the clinical encounter. In A. Govrin & J. Mills (Eds.), Innovations in Psychoanalysis: Originality, Development, Progress. Routledge.
Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.

Authenticity in Psychoanalytic Therapy: The Vicissitudes of Being Real

A reflection on Michael Guy Thompson’s “Vicissitudes of Authenticity in the Psychoanalytic Situation,” in Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity (Thompson, 2024).

Introduction, why authenticity matters in psychoanalytic therapy

“Two chairs in a therapy room representing authenticity in psychoanalytic therapy

Authenticity in psychoanalytic therapy is rarely announced as the explicit aim of treatment, partly because the word itself has been worn thin by culture, and partly because psychoanalysis has historically preferred to speak in a technical idiom, as if what matters most can be safeguarded by speaking in concepts that keep the moral imagination at bay. Yet Thompson proposes that the analytic relationship, when taken seriously, is better characterized as a quest for authenticity than as the mere cultivation of insight, adaptation, or symptom relief, and he makes that proposal precisely because the consulting room is one of the few places where a person can discover, in a lived way, what it costs to tell the truth about themselves without converting that truth into a performance (Thompson, 2024).

This is not a romantic claim about “being yourself,” as though the self were a stable possession waiting behind the curtain, nor is it a recruitment slogan for therapy; it is closer to an existential claim about what it means to bear reality when one can no longer hide behind the small dishonesties that make life feel manageable. If psychoanalysis has an ethical gravity, it may be found less in the therapist’s values, and more in the peculiar demand that the situation makes on both people, namely that they meet one another under conditions where evasion becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.

Introduction, why authenticity matters in psychoanalytic therapy

Patients rarely arrive saying, “I want authenticity,” and when they do, it is often because they have already tried to purchase that feeling through other means, through reinvention, through disclosure without consequence, through the curated honesty of social media, through the moral certainty of an identity that never needs to be questioned. More often, what arrives is distress, the fog of anxiety or the bluntness of depression, an unnameable dissatisfaction in love, or the weary sense of living at a distance from one’s own life, and yet, if one listens without rushing to interpret, a quieter wish can be heard beneath the presenting problem: the wish to become less divided, less strategic, less coerced by fear into living a life that does not feel like one’s own.

For therapists, that same wish appears in a different register, not as a “goal” to be delivered, but as the atmosphere that slowly develops when a patient senses that the hour is not organized around being managed, corrected, or recruited into optimism. In that atmosphere, what begins to matter is whether speech can become more than reporting, whether the patient can risk saying what is true enough to disturb their familiar self-understanding, and whether the therapist can tolerate the consequences of that disturbance without turning the work into reassurance or technique-as-theater.

Why psychoanalysis rarely names authenticity directly

Thompson’s first move is deceptively simple: he points out that authenticity is not a conventional technical term in psychoanalysis, even though what he means by authenticity has “pervaded psychoanalysis from its inception,” and he treats that mismatch as more than a historical curiosity (Thompson, 2024). When something is central yet unnamed, the unnamed thing tends to reappear in distorted forms, sometimes as ideology, sometimes as sentimentality, sometimes as the brittle insistence that one’s technique is “neutral” while one’s practice is quietly organized around fear.

Philosophy, culture, and the discomfort of ambiguity

The word authenticity enters the psychoanalytic bloodstream through existential philosophy, and Thompson notes that this alone creates resistance, since many analysts are temperamentally and institutionally averse to philosophical reading, even when the clinical situation forces philosophical questions upon them (Thompson, 2024). He also locates a cultural divide: European sensibilities have more readily treated suffering as a source of strength and character, whereas American sensibilities are more inclined to treat suffering primarily as trauma and psychopathology, and authenticity sits uneasily at precisely that interface because it refuses to promise comfort as the criterion of truth (Thompson, 2024).

What makes the term especially difficult, however, is not simply its philosophical pedigree but its ambiguity, since authenticity cannot be stabilized as a measurable outcome without being falsified by that very stabilization. Thompson suggests that the pragmatic, market-oriented description of psychoanalysis as increasing “work and love” becomes, in this context, a kind of defensive simplification, because it allows the field to speak in terms that sound sellable while avoiding the darker and more demanding question of what a person is willing to face about their own existence (Thompson, 2024).

Authenticity is not a moral checklist

One of Thompson’s most clarifying claims is that authenticity has “no specific moral agenda,” and that the absence of an inherent moral program is precisely what many clinicians find disturbing (Thompson, 2024). In a culture that alternates between moral exhibitionism and moral cynicism, it is tempting to make authenticity mean “doing the right thing,” or “saying the honest thing,” or “being transparent,” but psychoanalysis becomes unrecognizable when it is reduced to character education, and existential thought becomes kitsch when it is reduced to a lifestyle. Even Charles Taylor’s influential effort to rehabilitate authenticity within a moral frame, whatever its virtues, illustrates the ease with which authenticity is pulled toward moral discourse and away from the clinical texture of the hour (Taylor, 1991).

In the analytic situation, authenticity is less a set of correct statements than a stance toward one’s own evasions, a willingness to see how one uses speech to hide, seduce, attack, or manage, and a willingness to notice how the other person is being recruited into that same familiar drama. It is not, therefore, a doctrine of disclosure, since disclosure can be used defensively, and it is not a doctrine of emotional intensity, since intensity can be theatrical; rather, it concerns the slow collapse of contrivance, which is why it is so often accompanied by shame, fear, and the temptation to flee into theory.

What Thompson means by authenticity in the analytic situation

Thompson restricts authenticity, for the purposes of his argument, to a few elementary attributes that are clinically useful because they resist the sentimental uses of the word: authenticity tends to involve the road less traveled, it tends to be more arduous and therefore potentially more rewarding than the easier path, and it is genuine in a way that resists generalization because it is context-specific and characterized by an absence of subterfuge or contrivance (Thompson, 2024). That final attribute matters clinically because it immediately places authenticity inside relationship rather than inside private conviction, and it implicitly aligns authenticity with psychoanalytic efforts to name what is “real” or “honest” in what he calls the extra-transference dimension of the treatment relationship (Thompson, 2024).

Unconventional, difficult, and strangely rewarding

To call authenticity “unconventional” is not to romanticize rebellion, but to notice that the patient’s deepest evasions are rarely idiosyncratic; they are usually culturally reinforced, often rewarded, and sometimes identical with what the patient thinks of as their character. The analytic demand, then, is not a demand for novelty but for a different kind of fidelity, fidelity to what is actually happening, including the parts that the patient has learned to speak around, and including the ways the patient tries to make the therapist into a collaborator in their avoidance.

This is why authenticity is arduous. When a patient begins to abandon familiar defenses, what they lose first is not misery but protection, and what replaces protection is not immediate freedom but exposure, and exposure is experienced as danger long before it is experienced as liberation. The analytic situation makes room for that danger without rushing to annul it, and in that sense it becomes one of the few relational spaces where a person can discover that they are capable of bearing what they previously treated as unbearable.

A winding path symbolizing the difficult but rewarding path of authenticity in therapy

Context-specific truthfulness, not a “one size fits all” stance

Because authenticity is context-specific, it cannot be codified as a stable therapeutic posture, and this has implications for technique: if the therapist tries to apply authenticity as a rule, the therapist will inevitably become inauthentic, because the “application” will be driven by the therapist’s need to be a certain kind of clinician rather than by responsiveness to what is actually happening between two people. Thompson is explicit that analysts may emphasize some dimensions of authenticity and neglect others, and he notes that Freud, Winnicott, Bion, and Lacan had markedly different clinical styles while still exemplifying something essential about authenticity, which should caution us against confusing authenticity with any single school’s technical identity (Thompson, 2024).

The practical implication is not eclecticism for its own sake, but humility: the question becomes less “What would an authentic analyst do?” and more “What is being demanded of us, here, if we are not to lapse into contrivance?” That question is not answered once, because the analytic situation does not stop changing, and neither do the ways the patient tries to manage closeness, fear, desire, and disappointment.

Authenticity and suffering, what analysis does (and does not) promise

If authenticity is made into a therapeutic slogan, it will be used to smuggle in rescue fantasies, and Thompson’s argument is partly an argument against rescue, not because he is indifferent to suffering, but because rescue fantasies are themselves among the most tenacious forms of inauthenticity. Psychoanalysis does not promise happiness, and when it pretends to, it becomes indistinguishable from those cultural forces that deny the inevitability of disappointment by selling solutions.

Freud’s “common unhappiness” and the end of rescue fantasies

Thompson recalls Freud’s austere line about the aim of analysis, “to transform hysterical misery into common unhappiness,” and he reads it not as cynicism but as a demand for honesty about the human condition, including the reality that the end of neurosis is not the end of suffering (Breuer & Freud, 1893–1895/1955; Thompson, 2024). The phrase becomes clinically useful when it is heard not as a lowering of expectations but as a refusal to lie, because what many patients experience as despair is often the dawning recognition that no other person, no perfect love, and no correct interpretation will exempt them from the burdens of being a finite human being.

Thompson presses this further with a Lacanian theme that he treats as existentially significant: the fantasy that someone will appear and solve one’s problems, like a parent who arrives just in time, is not relinquished by reasoning or coercion, but through the day-to-day experience of bearing disappointment while simultaneously trying to understand one’s resistance to it (Thompson, 2024). The rescue fantasy is not a childish error to be scolded; it is a form of hope that has become fused with dependency, and letting it go feels, at first, like letting go of life itself, which is why it requires a setting where disappointment is not humiliating but metabolizable.

Winnicott and Bion, becoming a “sufferer,” and why fear belongs

Thompson’s use of Winnicott is similarly stark. He cites Winnicott’s claim that “If we are successful [as analysts] we enable our patients to abandon invulnerability and become a sufferer,” and he treats this as a description of what authenticity demands, namely the renunciation of invulnerability as a way of living (Winnicott, 1989; Thompson, 2024). The language is jarring only if one assumes that the goal of treatment is to eliminate suffering; if one assumes instead that the goal is to make suffering bearable without distortion, then becoming a sufferer sounds less like a defeat and more like a recovery of basic human capacity, the capacity to feel what is real without collapsing or retaliating.

Bion’s contribution, as Thompson presents it, is even less consoling: Bion suggests that analyst and patient should both be experiencing fear, and that if they are not, they have no business being there, a formulation that treats fear not as a symptom to be neutralized but as a sign of proximity to what matters (Bion, 1974; Thompson, 2024). This is not an endorsement of intimidation, and it is not a claim that therapy should be frightening, but it is an insistence that authentic work approaches what the patient has organized their life to avoid, and avoidance, when it begins to fail, is experienced as danger.

Technique in service of authenticity

In Thompson’s frame, technique is not discarded, but it is stripped of its defensive uses. Technique exists to protect the analytic situation from the seductions of comfort, control, and mutual collusion, and when technique is understood in that way, its ethical dimension becomes clearer: it is not primarily about being correct, it is about refusing the forms of dishonesty that both patient and analyst will tend to prefer.

Free association as an honesty practice

Thompson’s earlier work on honesty makes explicit something that is often treated as a historical artifact: the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis is, at its core, a pledge, a contract in which the patient agrees to be candid, to say what comes to mind and to try not to lie about it, even though Freud discovered that this is precisely what patients are loath to do because they fear what their secrets reveal about themselves (Thompson, 2004). When this is taken seriously, free association is not a quaint ritual; it is the difficult practice of speaking beyond the edited self, and the therapist’s task becomes not to reward eloquence but to keep faith with the premise that what is most important is what the patient least wants to say.

In that sense, free association and honesty in therapy are not reducible to confession, because confession often seeks absolution; free association seeks exposure, not exposure to the therapist’s judgment, but exposure to oneself, which is why it so often produces ambivalence and resistance. Thompson emphasizes that the analytic encounter is inherently conversational, even when classical technique tries to deny this, and that conversation, when it is not merely gratifying but intelligently restrained, becomes a humanizing tool that can deepen free association rather than dilute it (Thompson, 2024).

FNeutrality, “evenly suspended attention,” and “erasing memory and desire”

Neutrality becomes corrupt when it is mistaken for emotional absence, because emotional absence is not neutral, it is a stance, and often a stance organized around the analyst’s fear of being affected. Thompson’s account of neutrality, both in The Ethic of Honesty and in his reading of Freud, emphasizes something closer to “not knowing,” a disciplined openness that empties the mind of preconception so that the patient’s experience can appear as it is, rather than as the analyst needs it to be (Thompson, 2004). Freud’s phrase “evenly suspended attention” and Bion’s phrase “erasing memory and desire” point in the same direction, not toward blankness, but toward the courage required to listen without forcing the hour into the analyst’s preferred narrative (Freud, 1915/1958; Bion, 1967; Thompson, 2024).

Thompson treats this as a feature of authenticity because it demands that the analyst relinquish the small dishonesties of certainty and mastery. If neutrality is real, it is felt by the patient not as coldness but as the unsettling experience of not being managed, which can provoke rage and longing precisely because it interrupts the patient’s habitual strategies of control.

Notebook and pen symbolizing free association and honesty in psychoanalytic therapy

Abstinence and the courage to disappoint

Abstinence, in Thompson’s rendering, is not a synonym for cruelty, and the confusion between abstinence and aloofness has done immense damage to the public understanding of psychoanalysis. He quotes Freud’s admonition that the analyst should treat transference love “like no other emotional relationship,” while also never returning it, rejecting it, or demanding it, which is a formulation that places abstinence in the service of protecting the analytic space from seduction and retaliation rather than in the service of moral superiority (Freud, 1915/1958; Thompson, 2004).

In Thompson’s chapter on authenticity, this theme converges with Lacan’s stark insistence that the analyst abandon the wish to be helpful when help is asked, give up the fantasy of miracles, and even relinquish the hope of ending treatment with gratitude. Thompson’s summary is brutal and clarifying: “The goal of analysis is to disappoint,” and disappointment is painful, often unappreciated at the time, and yet potentially liberating because it undermines the patient’s investment in rescue fantasies (Thompson, 2024; Schneiderman, 1983). If abstinence is practiced with intelligence rather than sadism, it becomes one way of protecting the patient from the therapist’s wish to be needed, which is one of the most common sources of inauthenticity in clinical work.

Transference and countertransference, and the real relationship

If there is a point in Thompson’s chapter that should unsettle therapists, it is his insistence that the concept of transference can itself become a defense, not for the patient but for the analyst, a way of refusing the impact of proximity by translating whatever is human into something that can be interpreted away.

When “transference” becomes a defense against proximity

Thompson argues that post-Freudian technique, particularly the versions that advertise themselves as “classical,” often redefines the analytic relationship by eliminating the personal or real relationship and expanding technique to cover what Freud treated as personal engagement, a shift that robs the relationship of genuineness in ways patients can feel and often complain about (Thompson, 2024). He is blunt: transference can become “a vehicle of defense against the realness of the person of the patient,” especially when it is convenient for the analyst to remove themselves from the impact of closeness (Thompson, 2024).

This is not an argument against transference interpretation. It is an argument against hiding behind transference interpretation. When every sign of warmth is interpreted as seduction, when every moment of closeness is treated as regression, and when the therapist’s own fear of intimacy is masked as technique, the analytic situation becomes a theater of avoidance that calls itself depth.

The personal relationship, credibility, and the ordinary negotiations of treatment

Thompson does not romanticize the personal relationship, and he is clear that it cannot be codified, since it varies with analysts, with patients, with stages of treatment, and with the moods and limits of both people (Thompson, 2024). Yet he insists that analysts inevitably talk to patients about ordinary matters, whether the analysis is working, whether the couch should be used, disagreements about frequency, absences, fees, and the simple question of what is being asked of each person, and these matters are resolved not by theory but by credibility, by the patient’s sense that the analyst is speaking without guile (Thompson, 2024).

He also makes a claim that many clinicians privately know but publicly avoid: the patient’s love for the analyst, not merely as projection but as something real that emerges through sustained proximity, is often the very condition that makes the trials of analysis endurable, and the field’s reluctance to speak of love is itself a symptom of its discomfort with authenticity in the therapeutic relationship (Thompson, 2024). To acknowledge this is not to abolish boundaries, it is to refuse the lie that the work occurs without human impact.

Conclusion, authenticity requires courage from both people

Thompson’s conclusion is not a celebration of authenticity as an ideal, but an insistence that change is necessarily painful and requires sacrifice, and therefore cannot be demanded from the patient by an analyst who insists on remaining safe behind detachment. If the patient must bear disappointment, fear, and the loss of protective fantasies, then the analyst must also bear sacrifice, not as martyrdom but as participation, since authenticity cannot be “applied” as technique from the comfort of evacuation, but must be suffered repeatedly as an act of courage throughout the treatment (Thompson, 2024).

In that sense, authenticity in psychoanalytic therapy names something like an ethic without moralism: a commitment to a relationship that is continually tempted toward contrivance, and yet capable, under the pressure of the work, of becoming more honest, more real, and therefore more alive.

James Norwood, PsyD
Associate Director, New School for Existential Psychoanalysis
Clinical Director, The Free Association Clinic for Existential Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis
Founder/CEO, In Person Therapy

References

Bion, W. R. (1967). Notes on Memory and Desire. In J. Lindon (Ed.), Psychoanalytic Forum (Vol. 2, pp. 271–280). Science House.
Bion, W. R. (1974). Bion’s Brazilian Lectures-1. Imago Editora Ltda.
Breuer, J., & Freud, S. (1893–1895/1955). Studies on Hysteria. Standard Edition (Vol. 2, pp. 1–305). Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1915/1958). Observations on Transference-Love: Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis III. Standard Edition (Vol. 12, pp. 157–171). Hogarth Press.
Heidegger, M. (1962/1927). Being and Time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Harper and Row.
Mitchell, S. A. (1992). True Selves, False Selves, and the Ambiguity of Authenticity. In N. J. Skolnick &S. C. Warshaw (Eds.), Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis. Analytic Press.
Nietzsche, F. (2002). Beyond Good and Evil (J. Norman, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.
Safranski, R. (1998). Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (E. Osers, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Schneiderman, S. (1983). Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero. Harvard University Press.
Taylor, C. (1991). The Ethics of Authenticity. Harvard University Press.
Thompson, M. G. (1994). The Truth About Freud’s Technique: The Encounter With the Real. New York University Press.
Thompson, M. G. (2004). The Ethic of Honesty: The Fundamental Rule of Psychoanalysis. Editions Rodopi.
Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.
Winnicott, D. W. (1989). Psychoanalytic Explorations (C. Winnicott, R. Shephard, & M. Davis, Eds.). Harvard University Press.

Will vs Desire in Psychoanalysis: Why Willpower Is Not the Whole Story

A reflection on Michael Guy Thompson’s “What Is the Will? On the Role of Desire in Psychoanalysis” (Chapter 4 of Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis)

Most people who arrive in psychotherapy do not need to be told what the “right” decision is, at least not in the thin, everyday sense of rightness, because they have usually rehearsed it for months or years, sometimes with impressive discipline and a kind of grim fidelity to self-critique, and what brings them in is the humiliating discovery that knowing what one should do is not the same thing as being able to do it.

That discovery is often moralized too quickly. When effort fails, the default explanation is characterological: not enough willpower, not enough motivation, not enough discipline. Yet the consulting room, if it is honest, keeps exposing a different structure of the problem, one in which “willpower in therapy” names less a solution than a confusion about what kind of creature a person is, and what actually moves, or obstructs, the movement of a life.

In Chapter 4 of Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis, Michael Guy Thompson asks the question with a deceptively ordinary bluntness: what is the will, and what is its relation to desire? What follows is not a technical footnote, because once the will is treated as mysterious rather than obvious, the whole modern moral economy of “just try harder” starts to look like a defense against something more disturbing, namely that desire and the unconscious do not politely wait for conscious plans, and that our experience of agency is more fragile, and more complicated, than the willpower story suggests.

Willpower in therapy and the experience of being stuck

The will is often imagined as an inner executive, a rational manager who surveys options, selects a course of action, and then commands the self to comply, as if the person were a well-designed machine that occasionally needs firmer leadership. Thompson sketches this familiar definition precisely in order to show how seductive it is, and how quickly it collapses when we take lived experience seriously, because it assumes that will is not only conscious but also controllable, always “at our disposal,” as though the mind were a hand that could simply grip more tightly when life becomes difficult.

Therapy, however, is full of phenomena that make that model feel naïve, not because patients are irrational, but because they are human. People decide and do not follow through. They achieve what they once wanted and find the achievement strangely empty. They sabotage a relationship they claim to value, not as a theatrical act of self-destruction, but with the eerie feeling of watching oneself do it anyway. They speak as if two voices were competing in the same body, one insisting on what is proper and one pulling toward what is forbidden, or feared, or simply alive.

If we stay at the level of discipline, we reduce this division to a defect. If we stay at the level of existential psychoanalysis and agency, we begin to hear it differently, as a conflict about desire and about what desire would require, and as a conflict that is not solved by pressure but by understanding, because pressure is so often the very instrument by which the self tries to suppress what it cannot admit it wants.

Will vs desire in psychoanalysis, the question beneath “try harder”

Thompson’s decisive reversal is stated in a line that deserves to be read slowly, precisely because it attacks a cherished modern fantasy, that we are autonomous choosers who can simply select our wants the way we select our clothes: “My desires choose me. I do not choose my desires.”

This is the pivot of will vs desire in psychoanalysis, and it is also the point where the moralism of “motivation vs discipline” becomes inadequate, because the question is no longer how to force compliance with a decision but how to understand what, in fact, has already been decided at another level, one that is not fully reflective, and that does not announce itself as a decision at all. Thompson even treats will itself as potentially non-conscious, which is to say that the very faculty we enlist to control desire may already be entangled with it, recruited by it, or turned against it.

When “trying harder” fails, the more existential question is not whether you lack strength, but what you are actually protecting yourself from by clinging to the language of strength. The willpower story offers a simple moral drama: I should, therefore I must. Desire interrupts that drama with a different disclosure: I do not, and the reason matters. The unconscious, in this sense, is not a basement full of irrational impulses, but the place where our real commitments, fears, and longings are already operative before we can dignify them with conscious reasons.

will vs desire in psychoanalysis, choice and agency

Two traditions of the will, and the moral burden we still carry

Thompson traces two opposed conceptions of will that still haunt contemporary therapy culture, even when their philosophical origins are forgotten. One tradition ties will to virtue, and therefore to self-mastery and goodness, while the other tradition treats will as synonymous with desire, and therefore as largely unconscious.

In the virtue tradition, Aristotle becomes a key point of reference, because the will is imagined as something that can be cultivated through wisdom and self-mastery, and the person who “chooses rightly” is not merely effective but admirable. Thompson’s point is not to dismiss this tradition, since its moral seriousness still animates many people’s sense of what a life ought to be, but to show how easily it becomes punitive when imported into psychotherapy as an expectation that one should be able to master oneself simply by deciding to.

Augustine intensifies the moral weight even further by naming will “the mother and guardian of virtue,” which quietly installs the idea that failure of will is not merely failure of action but failure of goodness, a shift that helps explain why willpower discourse so quickly turns into shame.

What follows in modernity is a further confusion, because the debate about “free will” often assumes that freedom means control, as if being free were identical with being able to override whatever one feels in the name of reason, and as if the presence of anxiety, grief, craving, ambivalence, or fear were simply obstacles to be conquered rather than experiences to be understood. Thompson notes how early modern thinkers questioned the very distinction between “will” and “free will,” and how the discussion opens directly into the problem of consciousness, of what it means to call something free, and of how ethics is entangled with that freedom.

Clinically, the cost of this confusion is predictable. If freedom is mistaken for control, then every failure to control oneself becomes proof that one is not free, and the person oscillates between omnipotent fantasy and helpless despair, between “I should be able to” and “I cannot,” without ever arriving at the more difficult possibility, that freedom may not look like mastery, and that responsibility may not look like self-condemnation.

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, when desire chooses us

Thompson locates a decisive rupture in the nineteenth century, when Schopenhauer situates will in the unconscious and explicitly equates it with desire, a move that makes the old executive model feel suddenly untenable.

Schopenhauer’s free-will quote is famous for a reason, because it offers a hard clarity that most people recognize immediately in their own lives, even if they dislike its implications: “You can do as you will, but you cannot will as you will.”

Thompson emphasizes the clinical sting: if desire is primary, then knowledge is often recruited after the fact, in the service of what is already wanted, and the demand to “choose better wants” becomes not only unrealistic but cruel, because it frames unconscious life as a moral defect rather than a human condition. Schopenhauer, on Thompson’s reading, abandons the fantasy that will is an executive function and places it in “a maelstrom of feelings, desires, and inclinations,” which is another way of saying that willpower is not a separate instrument we can simply pick up, but part of the very life we are trying to control.

Nietzsche receives Schopenhauer’s disruption without adopting his pessimism, and Thompson’s interpretation is worth lingering on because it reframes the usual popular caricature of Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s “Will to Power,” Thompson suggests, can be read less as domination than as “Desire to Passion,” a striving toward a life that is not merely compliant but intense, engaged, and willing to risk itself in living.

Whether one agrees with every nuance of that gloss, the clinical point is sharp: the opposite of health is not simply weak will, but deadened desire, a life organized around safety, approval, and self-suppression. In that condition, the will can still function, sometimes brilliantly, producing careers, achievements, and outward success, and yet the person suffers a quieter collapse of vitality, the feeling that one is living someone else’s life, or living one’s own life as if it belonged to a stranger.

Freud’s ego and id, the rider and the horse

Thompson’s chapter becomes especially clinically legible when it moves into Freud, because Freud offers a vocabulary that many therapists already carry, even if they no longer use it explicitly, and that vocabulary is still useful for thinking about how “will” can become both ally and adversary. Thompson summarizes Freud’s position in a way that also satisfies the familiar SEO phrase, the Freud ego and id rider-and-horse metaphor: Freud situates will in the ego, while desire is lodged in libido, or the id, and the relation between them is “analogous to a rider on a horse,” where the horse “knows where it wants to go” and the rider tries, with mixed success, to guide it.

The important word here is not guidance but compromise. Freud, in Thompson’s rendering, is neither a moralist of reason nor a celebrant of impulse; he is a realist about conflict. The “happy person” is not the one who conquers desire, but the one who has “come to terms with his desires” and therefore does not waste life fighting an internal civil war, while the neurotic “doesn’t trust his desires” and suppresses them “out of fear.”

From this angle, symptoms do not arise because desire exists but because desire is treated as dangerous, shameful, or intolerable, which is why the will, when enlisted as a weapon against desire, so often becomes an agent of repression rather than an agent of freedom. The will can either serve desire, by not getting in its way, or it can become the instrument by which a person tries to extinguish what is most personal, and then wonders why life feels impersonal.

Freud rider and horse metaphor, ego and desire in therapy

Why change is indirect, Sartre, Laing, and the limits of willpower

The question that naturally follows is one that matters equally to patients and to clinicians: if will is not sovereign, and if desire cannot simply be commanded, how does change happen at all, and what exactly is therapy doing when it is not simply coaching better discipline.
Thompson’s answer proceeds through the existential tradition. He invokes Sartre in a way that brings the ethical stakes into view, since Sartre suggests that neurosis can be understood as a kind of fundamental choice, made at an unconscious and pre-reflective level, which means that our suffering is not only a consequence of what happened to us but also a meaningful way we have taken up what happened, and therefore something for which we remain implicated.

This is the point where Sartre’s freedom and responsibility in therapy become psychologically relevant, because responsibility is not reduced to self-blame, and freedom is not reduced to control, but both become ways of naming that a person is not merely the passive object of forces, whether those forces are called trauma, drives, or pathology.
Yet Thompson is equally clear about the limit: “If I cannot will myself to health, then how does change come about?” He reports that when he asked R.D. Laing this question in supervision, Laing answered with one word, “indirectly.”

That single word, and the way Thompson elaborates it, cuts through the false alternative between helplessness and voluntarism. He writes that one cannot will oneself to overcome the fear of intimacy, to love more generously, to behave more compassionately, or to feel more alive, and yet these dilemmas often improve as a consequence of the endeavor to know oneself, even if the mechanism of that change remains mysterious.

This is also where Thompson’s critique of certain modern therapies becomes precise rather than polemical. He notes that behavioral psychology, and later CBT, often equate will with volition, assume that choices are driven by rationality rather than desire, and treat willpower as the capacity to commit to a course of action by correcting irrational thought.

Thompson does not deny that people sometimes improve, but he offers a deeper explanation for why improvement happens when it does: according to Laing, what probably helps CBT patients change is not willpower at all but desire, and specifically the desire that emerges through the relationship with the therapist, “not willfully but indirectly,” which is to say unconsciously.

If we take that seriously, the contemporary contrast between motivation vs discipline looks like a displacement. Discipline can sometimes produce behavior, but therapy is concerned with the conditions under which a person can want, and can tolerate wanting, and can bear the risk that wanting entails. That is not a slogan, and it is not a technique in the narrow sense. It is an encounter with freedom that does not flatter us with fantasies of control.

“I should” versus “I want,” where shame disguises fear

One of the more clinically illuminating sections of Thompson’s chapter turns on a simple linguistic difference that both patients and therapists know, even when they do not name it: the difference between “I should” and “I want.” The “should” voice has moral force, and it often has the tone of an internalized authority, while “want” risks sincerity, which is precisely why it often feels more dangerous.
Thompson illustrates this through addiction, not in the flattened, behavioral sense of a bad habit, but as a conflict about desire itself. The addict may feel he should stop because his life is being destroyed, yet “unless he genuinely wants to, he will fail,” because the will is an executive function that can serve desire or oppose it, and when it is in opposition the person becomes divided against himself.

Here Thompson’s language is intentionally provocative, and it is clinically accurate enough to be unsettling: the addict tells himself he must get “in control,” as if a force of will could steel him against desire, but this refusal to genuinely want is sustained by an “introjected mommy” that tries to make him do what he does not actually want to do, and Laing, as Thompson reports him, believes this never works.

The deeper point is not confined to substances, because the structure appears wherever the will is mobilized to suppress the pain of desire, which is also to say the pain of living, the pain of risk, and the pain of possible failure. Thompson writes that at bottom the addict wants to be free of the pain elicited by desire, and therefore medicates the pain, yet “you can never kill your desire, you can only redirect it,” because desire entails risk and the possibility of disappointment, which the addicted person cannot tolerate.

In this light, what looks like weak will is often a more complex drama, where will is recruited as a defense against desire, or where will becomes the instrument of fear. One can live in that arrangement for a long time, even successfully by external standards, and Thompson makes the point with a bleak irony: you do not even need drugs to reduce anxiety, because “your will can do it for you,” and will and desire are often at cross purposes regarding how much risk we allow ourselves.

This is a difficult claim to hear, especially for conscientious people, because it suggests that the will is not automatically the ally of growth, and may in fact “resist change,” which is why moral exhortation so often produces the opposite of what it intends, namely a tightening of defenses and a deepening of shame.

Thompson’s own clinical implication is precise and, in its way, austere. Genuine change comes about when we want to change, not because we need to or should, and therapy’s function is not to coerce desire into propriety but to use our capacity for reflection, which he identifies here with will, to assess why we get in the way of our desires and to put defenses into question. We cannot will ourselves to let go of defenses, but inquiry can lead to change even when we have no control over the matter.

For clinicians, this reframes technique as something less like intervention upon a patient and more like participation in a process of clarification, where the patient’s ambivalence is not treated as noncompliance but as meaningful conflict, and where the therapist’s task is not to win an argument with resistance but to help make the patient’s resistance intelligible, which is a different kind of respect. For patients, the same reframing can be experienced as a release from the moral theater of discipline, because it suggests that the problem is not that one is defective, but that one’s desire is conflicted, feared, or hidden, and that truthfulness about that conflict is already a movement toward freedom.

“I should” versus “I want,” where shame disguises fear

desire and willpower in existential psychoanalysis

Conclusion

The ordinary language of willpower promises dignity through control, and when control fails it offers shame as an explanation, as if shame were the missing fuel that will finally make a person comply with what they already know they “should” do. Thompson’s chapter quietly dismantles that arrangement by refusing to treat the will as a simple command center, and by insisting that will vs desire in psychoanalysis is, at bottom, a question about what we are, about how desire and the unconscious constitute our agency, and about how fear turns the will into a defensive instrument.

If desire chooses us, and if the will is not always conscious or controllable, then therapy cannot be reduced to motivation, discipline, or self-management. It becomes, instead, an indirect process in Laing’s sense, grounded in the slow work of reflection and the capacity to question defenses without pretending we can simply abolish them by command, and oriented toward the more existential aim of becoming less divided against oneself.

Free Association Clinic offers psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy. If you would like to begin a conversation, you can contact Free Association Clinic.

Sources

Aristotle. (1915). The Works of Aristotle, Vol. IX: Ethica Nicomachea (W. D. Ross, Trans.). Oxford University Press.
Augustine. (2010). Augustine: On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy). Cambridge University Press.
Laing, R. D. (1979). Personal communication.
Nietzsche, F. (2001). Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (J. Norman, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.
Schopenhauer, A. (2012). The World as Will and Representation (E. F. J. Payne, Trans.). Dover Publications.
Thompson, M. G. (1994). The Truth About Freud’s Technique: The Encounter with the Real. New York University Press.
Thompson, M. G. (2020). Existential psychoanalysis: The role of freedom in the clinical encounter. In A. Govrin & J. Mills (Eds.), Innovations in Psychoanalysis: Originality, Development, Progress. Routledge.
Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.

Heidegger’s View of Language in Psychoanalysis: Logos, Truth, and Creativity

A Reflection on Michael Guy Thompson’s Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis

Reflection:

In a culture saturated with messaging, podcasts, headlines, and constant explanation, it is easy to assume that language is mainly a tool. We use it to report, to persuade, to clarify, to manage. Consider even the recent advent of AI which furnishes answers rather than questions, and certainty rather than thinking (even when it’s wrong!). Then you step into therapy, and something stranger happens. A sentence that sounded simple in your head becomes hard to say out loud. A familiar story suddenly feels uncertain. Silence has weight.

In Chapter 3 of Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis, Michael Guy Thompson turns to Martin Heidegger to explore Heidegger’s view of language in psychoanalysis, and why the “talking cure” is not primarily about exchanging information (Thompson, 2024). It is about truth, creativity, and the rare experience of letting words reveal what we did not know we were protecting ourselves from.

“To undergo an experience … means that this something befalls us, strikes us, overwhelms and transforms us.” (Heidegger, 1971, p. 57)

Heidegger’s view of language in psychoanalysis, a quiet therapy room

Heidegger’s view of language in psychoanalysis: from representation to revelation

One of Heidegger’s central objections is that we often treat language as if it were a neutral system of labels. On this view, words simply “stand for” things. They are signs, and the real world sits behind them like an object behind glass.

Thompson suggests that this representational approach is not only philosophically thin, it can become clinically misleading (Thompson, 2024). If language is merely a container for facts, then therapy becomes a hunt for the right explanation. The goal becomes a correct report about the past, a correct diagnosis, a correct insight.

Heidegger points in a different direction. Language is not only something we use. It is also the place where we live our lives with others, and where we become intelligible to ourselves (Heidegger, 1971; Thompson, 2024). In that sense, language is not simply descriptive. It is disclosive.
This matters in the consulting room, because what brings people to therapy is rarely a simple lack of information. Many people already know the “facts” of their history. The difficulty is that the facts are relegated to information that is not experienced. The person can speak about what happened, but they cannot yet speak from within what happened. The difference is subtle, and it is often the difference between reciting and revealing.

Undergoing an experience with language: why therapy is not just communication

Thompson highlights a distinction in Heidegger that resonates with psychoanalysis: the difference between using language functionally and actually experiencing language (Thompson, 2024). We can speak all day without being touched by what speech is doing.
In everyday life, language is often practical. We schedule. We negotiate. We summarize. Even when we describe feelings, we can do so in ways that keep those feelings safely at a distance.

Heidegger argues that an experience with language, the form that involves an undergoing, is not automatic. It is something we can resist, and something that can overwhelm us when we stop resisting (Heidegger, 1971; Thompson, 2024). In a psychoanalytic setting, this becomes recognizable. Patients are invited to speak with no particular aim in mind, a stance closely associated with Freud’s conception of free association. The point is not to produce the “right” story. The point is to make room for what language brings forward when we stop forcing it to behave.

This also helps explain why therapy can feel oddly risky, even when the topic seems ordinary. Words can carry more than we intend. We can discover that our usual explanations have been serving as a shield. And when that shield loosens, what appears is not just information, but a new kind of contact with ourselves.

language as self-disclosure in psychoanalytic therapy

Logos, listening, and the difference between conversation and chatter

Thompson follows Heidegger into the older meanings of logos, tracing how the word is connected to gathering, arranging, and being heard (Thompson, 2024). This is not just linguistic trivia. It is a way of getting to the roots of what language most essentially is.
In this view, speaking is not simply transmitting content. It is a kind of gathering, a bringing-together of a life into words. A story is not only a report. It is an attempt to make experience hold together.

But Heidegger also warns that much of what passes for talk is a defense against genuine dialogue. Thompson emphasizes Heidegger’s critique of what he calls idle chatter, the kind of speech that circulates without depth, without risk, without real listening (Thompson, 2024). We talk about things, but we do not truly speak to one another.

In the consulting room, this distinction becomes clinically significant. Many people arrive with highly practiced ways of speaking. They can describe their relationships, their work, their symptoms, their childhood. Yet something in the speech feels curiously untouched, as if the person is narrating from a distance.

The shift is not something the therapist “listens for” like a technician. It is something that happens to the person speaking. A familiar account can suddenly lose its polish. Words that used to feel like a report begin to press back on the speaker, and the speaker is forced to endure what is being said.
When that occurs, the analytic hour is no longer about describing life from a distance. It becomes one of the places where life is actually lived. There is a different kind of closeness here, not sentimental intimacy, but the seriousness of being encountered by what is real, in the presence of another person.

Creativity as revelation: what art teaches the analytic hour

A striking move in Thompson’s chapter is the bridge from language to creativity. He draws on Heidegger’s claim that art is not simply decoration or self-expression. Art is a site where truth happens (Heidegger, 1971; Thompson, 2024).

This is a challenging idea, and it becomes easier to grasp if we think of creativity less as talent and more as revelation. A work of art can show something real about human existence, something we did not have words for, until we encountered it. In that sense, creativity is not a luxury. It is one of the ways reality becomes visible.

Thompson suggests that psychoanalysis has a parallel structure (Thompson, 2024). The point is not to manufacture clever interpretations. The point is to let something concealed become unconcealed through speech, through association, through the slow formation of meaning over time.

This is why psychoanalysis is sometimes described as a creative process. Not because it asks patients to be artists, but because it asks them to participate in an unfolding. As language gathers experience, new connections appear. Not all at once. Not on command. Often indirectly.

In that way, the analytic hour can be understood as a kind of work, a living act of making sense. The creativity is not in inventing a prettier narrative. The creativity is in allowing a truer one to take shape.

Poetry and dwelling: making room for what wants to be said

Thompson returns to Heidegger’s deep interest in poetry, and to a famous line associated with Hölderlin: “poetically, man dwells” (Thompson, 2024). For Heidegger, poetry is not an escape from reality. It is a way of dwelling with reality, of staying close to what is most difficult to say.

This offers a quiet critique of contemporary life. In the information age, we often treat words as consumable, and we treat meaning as something we can quickly acquire. Thompson echoes Heidegger’s concern that modern culture can become numbing, full of stimuli that mimic insight without requiring transformation (Thompson, 2024).

Therapy can be a counter-space. A place to slow down. A place where the pressure to perform coherence relaxes, and where it becomes possible to sit with experience long enough for it to speak back.

Thompson also makes a clinical point that can feel almost subversive: the more the therapist tries to get ahead of language with rigid plans and strategies, the more language becomes estranged, and the less likely the patient is to find their own way through suffering (Thompson, 2024). This does not mean therapy lacks structure. It means that the structure is meant to protect a certain kind of openness, an openness where words can arrive from somewhere deeper than intention.

truth and creativity in Heidegger’s philosophy of language

What this means for clients and clinicians in training

This chapter has a simple but demanding implication: language in therapy is not just a vehicle, it is part of the treatment.

For prospective clients, that can be reassuring. You do not need to arrive with the perfect narrative. You do not need to know what is “important” before you speak. Often what matters most is what you keep skipping over, what you say too quickly, what you cannot quite put into words, and what you feel tempted to turn into a joke.

For clinicians in training, Thompson’s reading of Heidegger is not an invitation to collect “listening skills” or to watch for cues like a technician. It is an invitation to take seriously the way language usually withholds itself and then, at certain points, breaks through.

Much of ordinary speech is functional, managerial, explanatory. It keeps experience organized at a safe distance. But when someone is actually undergoing what they are saying, that functional surface can begin to fail. Words arrive that feel inconvenient, embarrassing, too sharp, or too intimate. The person speaking may hesitate, lose the thread, repeat themselves, or fall silent. None of this needs to be treated as a trick to decode. It is often the very place where language, no longer merely used, begins to be endured.

And meaning, in this sense, is not something imposed from above. It gathers over time. A phrase recurs. A topic is reliably avoided. A familiar story keeps returning but changes its shape. Slowly, the hour collects its own vocabulary, until the person can finally speak from within what they have been saying all along.

If you are a clinician interested in developing this kind of listening, our training program in existential psychoanalysis is designed to support that depth of clinical work.

Conclusion

In Chapter 3, Thompson uses Heidegger to clarify why psychoanalysis takes language so seriously. Words are not only carriers of information. They are events. They reveal, they conceal, they gather, they disrupt, and sometimes they transform (Thompson, 2024). Logos, in this sense, is not a theory to apply, it is something to listen for.

When therapy is at its best, it offers a rare form of conversation, one that moves beyond idle chatter toward truthfulness and mutual recognition. It also treats creativity as part of healing, not creativity as performance, but creativity as the slow emergence of what is real.

At the Free Association Clinic, our work in psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy makes room for this kind of careful dialogue. If you would like to explore whether this approach fits what you are seeking, you can contact the Free Association Clinic.

References

Heidegger, M. (1971). On the Way to Language (P. D. Hertz, Trans.). Harper & Row.
Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, Language, Thought (A. Hofstadter, Trans.). Harper & Row.
Thompson, M. G. (1985). The Death of Desire: A Study in Psychopathology. New York University Press.
Thompson, M. G. (1994). The Truth About Freud’s Technique: The Encounter with the Real. New York University Press.
Thompson, M. G. (1998, January). The Fundamental Rule of Psychoanalysis. The Psychoanalytic Review, 85(1).
Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.