Simone Webber, M.Sc., BA., B.pth.
Contacts:
praxis@psychoanalyse-wien-webber.at
+43 676 4732920
Wickenburggasse 3 / 11, 1080, Wien
Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy
Psychotherapist (iAuS) // Psychologist
Simone Webber
Psychologist and Psychotherapist in Training under Supervision
Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy
English - German - Italian
“One of the aesthetic accomplishments of dream work is the dream setting, the establishment of an environment composed of imagery that leads the dreamer into the dream experience. […] We inquire how the dreamer is handled by the ego, a structural and aesthetic consideration that can complement our posing questions about the dream’s thematic content, much as we might distinguish between the thematic and the aesthetic properties of a poem. A poem is a unique way of forming a theme, and poetic handling becomes as important as the theme it presents; similarly a dream is a special technique of forming meaning, for the dream not only speaks us – it handles us.”
Christopher Bollas in "The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known"
What is psychoanalysis? Why does it matter (to me)?
Psychoanalysis is a therapeutic and theoretical approach to the human mind. It was coined by Sigmund Freud over a century ago and has developed in manyfold directions ever since. He brought to life a form of “talking cure”, based on the central idea that unconscious processes greatly determine our conscious feelings and thoughts. Psychoanalysts after Freud have sustained the interest in the interplay between conscious, preconscious and unconscious mental processes and have further explored how these processes relate to emotional suffering, intrapsychic or interpersonal conflicts and other difficulties in life.
Psychoanalysis, as I understand it, also considers the individual as thrown into and embedded into the social and political sphere. Human beings are social beings and our own personal histories are embedded into collective histories. Different groups, but also socio-political, economic and cultural factors that we consciously or unconsciously inhabit, have a significant impact on the environments of our own mental landscapes and the idiomatic ways in which our character seeks for expression.
Psychoanalysis is not an educational praxis that offers specific advice or tries to teach certain techniques of self-improvement. As a matter of fact, the psychoanalytic encounter points to the fact that there are no easy and readymade answers. Instead, psychoanalysis focuses on the very individual and his or her specific ways of inhabiting the analytic space and the psychoanalytic relationship. Working psychoanalytically, I seek to create a safe and confidential space where it becomes possible to express one’s feelings, desires and thoughts out loud in an open and free manner. Analyst and analysand can then wonder together, what it is, that is unfolding in the session, in them and between them. Analysand and analyst are put to work to understand both the content and the aesthetic of the speech. The nature of the relationship that is being created between them is informing this very task. Through this work, a deeper understanding of the significance and function of our difficulties (and symptoms) in life can be reached and change is facilitated.
What is trying to speak through my suffering? What is, sometimes so desperately, trying to find a route of expression? Why am I constantly repeating the same patterns that make me suffer? How can I put my experience of suffering into words? How can I be able to be creative, playful and feel alive? What is it that I desire and why do I always seem to be giving up on my own desire? What can I make out of what has been made of me? These examples give a sense of the questions that might be at stake in an analysis.
Psychoanalysis, for me, at its core, is about exploring and experimenting with different ways of being-in-the-world and being with ourselves and others. Exploring, within free association and within the relational matrix between analyst and analysand, modes of relating to one´s past, present and future. It is a way to defamiliarize the familiar: making us look at familiar thoughts, feelings, relationships, etc. in new ways, seeing how strange, bizarre, odd and awe-evoking these familiar phenomena actually are and giving them second thoughts.
“Castration means that jouissance has to be refused in order to be attainable on the inverse scale of the Law of desire”