Folks might ask, do we really need to start with infancy?
Yes.
Your personal filter systems for selectively responding to things in the environment began to develop during your first year.
Your selective orientation towards and away from objects* in your environment began to develop during your first year.
Attractors inspired your effort and increasing contol of musculature permitted your willful action during your first year.
Competency and power were manifest during your first year.
Preconceptual schemas enabling engagement were foundational for the development of your entirely unique personality during your first year.
People are not inspired to do analysis to better understand their first few years. People are inspired because something about their real time life has become difficult. Analysis addresses itself to undercurrents giving rise to the difficulty.
Analysis is a bottom up approach to helping folks. It directly engages the whole of who one is. It casts light upon the root structure of personality. The root structure here, is a metaphor for the constellations of patterns that comprise patterns.
Tibetan Buddhism anyone? We are patterns in this paradigm. In fact much of the teaching of the Buddhas can be viewed as entirely consistent with the best of cognitive psychology.
Many psychotherapies today are top down approaches. Cognitive therapy, for example can be very helpful. The method of cognitive therapy relies upon patterns of current thinking. The reality of relative perception is introduced. Are you familiar with the childrens tale about the blind man and the elephant?
One blind man puts his arms around the leg of the elephant and describes an elephant. One blind man feels the tusk and describes an elephant, another blind man…Well, you get the idea. Each blind man is correct however each has access to a part-picture. This is relative perception.
Cognitive therapy can be very helpful to a point. It can flesh out greater understanding of much that has occurred. It exploits the fact that perception is relative; relative to our position in a dynamic, relative to our capacity to understand at the ripe old age of 6, 10 or 12.
Cognitive therapy is thoroughly imbedded in analysis as are most popular psychotherapies today, narrative therapy, inner child work to name a few. Only analysis, however, addresses itself to the whole of who we are teasing up memories and teasing out adaptive patterns that developed years ago that no longer well serve.
Analysis, as a bottom up approach, casts light upon universal needs, universal tendencies and our very human efforts to adapt to all manner of circumstances including cultural contexts ie; two room homes in the hinterlands, sex segregated households, and familial contexts ie; households with one or more alcoholic parents.
Analysis itself is by no means linear as those of you who are venturing to do your self analysis have seen. Focus on one event and pop, pop, pop, a host of related recollections and images come up.
I remember riding along on the handlebars of my sisters’ bicycle when my foot got caught in the spokes. We fell on the ground, coincidently right in front of the building housing the office of our family physician. I immediately recall the intersection, its’ proximity to our apartment, the neighborhood store where I bought my chocalate flavored soft drinks. No Fanta or Coco Cola for me. I was taken to his office and soon (how soon?) all was well.
Any one of us can focus upon one incident and a host of memories will pop up. Our memories are accessible. To the extent we can vivify them, that is ‘travel back in time’ to make them real, we can more fully understand, events,
as we experienced them.
as we can better understand them with the benefit of hindsight,
as they cast light upon so many other aspects of our lives,
as the led us to conclude what? Fear what?
I cite this example not to focus upon trauma but rather to focus upon memory. Information is not stored linearly. Information is stored by associative links. Although our discussion of the development of our personality is necessarily linear, our analysis is necessarily non-linear.
*Bear in mind, people, cats and dogs are objects in infancy.
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