Someone asked me recently if I really thought that longer term depth psychotherapy was really necessary. Necessary? I don't know that I can determine that for anyone other than myself, but I can say it is valuable for the person who wants to learn more about how she came to where she is in her life, what forces are operative in order to have a wider array of choices moving forward.
Jung said, "Generally speaking, all the life which the parents could have lived, but of which they thwarted themselves for artificial motives, is passed on to the children in substitute form. That is to say, the children are driven unconsciously in a direction that is intended to compensate for everything that was left unfulfilled in the lives of their parents. Hence it is that excessively moral-minded parents have what are called "unmoral" children, or an irresponsible wastrel of a father has a son with a positively morbid amount of ambition, and so on. "
In my own case, I remember all the time I was growing up the very clear sense that I was to go to college. Nothing was ever said about it, I just knew. My parents were both very bright people who had many of their own ambitions nipped in the bud when they married in their late teens and in the depths of the Depression. Neither of them attended college nor did either of them achieve the dreams of their youth nor did either of them do anything about that as they grew older and opportunity was greater. Their unmet desires to go to college, to be something were transmitted directly to me so that I never even questioned whether or not I wanted to go or that I would. Fortunately for me, this instance of parents' unfinished business is a benign one and one that served me well. But it is not always thus.
Consider some of our characters from In Treatment. Laura and Alex and Paul are all caught in webs of their parents' unfulfilled lives tangling up in their own dramas. These themes can continue over several generations if no one wakes up to them. Many years ago I interviewed a woman who came from a family where going back 3 generations, women had dropped out of school due to pregnancy. Throughout her teen years, she was given the message not to get pregnant and to graduate. When I asked how she had managed to escape the family curse, she told me it wasn't because she had heeded the conscious message she was given; it was because she was unable to conceive! The messages came on two levels -- the conscious admonition to do as they told her not as they did and the unconscious one that all a woman was good for was taking care of a man and her children. And it was the unconscious message she had tried to obey.
In depth psychotherapy there is the opportunity to explore these themes and begin to tease them apart. Laura might then be able to develop a relationship with a man who would notice her and care for her, be a real parter to her. Or Alex might be able to determine for himself what it means to be a strong man, what it means to be a father.
These are issues that often arise at midlife when life calls us to look again at who we are, what we have done, what we believe in. This is prime time for discovering what is the story we have been living; as Jung put it -- I asked myself, "What is the the myth you are living?" and found that I did not know. So...I took it upon myself to get to know "my" myth, an I regarded this as the task of tasks...I simply had to know what unconscious or preconscious myth was forming me."
More about personal myth in another post.