Re: Pshychoanalysis anyone?

[Anonymous]

In my nursing career, I have seen too many examples of the mind influencing the body to dismiss the psychoanalytical perspective out of hand. The worst case was a woman who was totally paralysed, BUT she still had reflexes – if you threw something at her, she would put her arms up in defense. There is no biological explanation for a disorder that causes paralysis but still allows such reflexive movements (beyond the basic plantar reflex and a few other very primitive reflexes). And there are the dying people who do not die until they have seen a particular person, or witnessed an event they have been looking forward to. Or the opposite, where a healthy person basically grieves themselves to death, even though their nutrition is maintained and there is no medical cause for their death.

In my research into psychoanalysis, I have even come across two cases of ADHD where the patients were no longer plagued by their worst symptoms after undergoing psychoanalysis. One was in a research study, and was a child who ended up not meeting the criteria for ADHD after treatment was complete, and the other was the story of a doctor who found that multimodal treatment (medication initially, and backed up by CBT and psychoanalysis) reduced his symptoms to such a manageable level that he began to wonder if he would still meet the DSM criteria for an ADHD diagnosis after all his treatments yielded their results. He stopped his medication early in the piece, after the initial “crisis” was over and therapy had begun to show positive results.

So it begs me to ask, what if my anxieties are compounding my ADHD symptoms and therapy can improve things from that perspective? What if therapy can help me see my dysfunctional methods of coping and thus reduce my reliance on them in the future? Personally, I don’t believe that my childhood was bad enough that I developed enough dysfunctional coping mechanisms to result in ADHD symptoms, so I need to learn to accept that this is who I am, but I also believe that the stresses I was under at certain times in my life could well have had a detrimental effect on my symptoms. I just need to look at the effect that 10 minutes of therapy had on me to see that I need to revisit and resolve some things from my past. But maybe, in the long run, I just want the contentment that “toofat” has.

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