Psychotherapy and subjective experience.

It is our aim in psychotherapy to introduce the neurotic person to himself. He is in some sense cut off from certain of his feelings, wishes and intentions as a result of internal conflict and, in fact, he is cut off from the nature of that conflict itself, sometimes even from an awareness of its existence. He experiences the symptoms of that conflict but he is in no position to resolve it. Our aim, however, is not to introduce the neurotic person to himself merely in the sense of informing him about the existence, nature or history of such conflict; that would probably not help him much more than telling him his diagnosis. It is rather to actually enlarge his experience of himself, specifically to enlarge his experience of and to make articulate the feelings and thoughts involved in that conflict and in this way to create the conditions for its resolution. I wish to propose that the effectiveness of this process depends upon the recognition or articulation by the therapist of feelings or thoughts of the patient that are in a certain sense already conscious, are actually within conscious subjective experience, yet are not and for certain dynamic reasons cannot be fully articulated or recognized by the patient himself. In proposing this--I shall give an example in a moment--I am calling attention to a kind of self-estrangement and a level of subjective experience and mental activity that, though I believe perfectly well known to all of us, are not distinguished by the traditional psychoanalytic division of mental processes into conscious, preconscious and unconscious.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)