Psychoanalysis in long sessions is an experience of coming to know oneself, one’s own history, one’s desires, including those that have remained unfulfilled, one’s fears, including those of which one is unaware, one’s defenses, repetitions, external and internal conflicts and dreams.
It is a process that, through recollection, brings one’s entire history back to life and makes it possible to rediscover the threads that run through it.
All of this is preserved in a forgotten memory that reaches back to childhood and to phylogenesis, and which is called the "unconscious".
Psychoanalysis in long sessions draws on the method of free associations introduced by Freud. It provides the time needed to gradually let oneself go to one’s associations and, at one’s own pace, to reconnect with one’s own lived experiences.
It is a progressive discovery of oneself, of one’s inner life, one’s potentialities, one’s uniqueness and one’s identity.
Specificity
Psychoanalysis in long sessions is characterised by important technical innovations introduced by Silvio Fanti.
The long sessions have two essential and inseparable characteristics: a duration of three hours and a frequency of at least five times a week.
The introduction of technical supports during the analysis. This is the study, by the analysand, of various documents relating to their life:
- the family tree
- personal and family photographs
- floor plans of the places where they have lived
- various writings (correspondence, drawings from infancy, diaries, …)
- listening to sessions recorded during the work.
Through the combination of these technical innovations, the analytic work gains in depth and coherence, allowing the analysand to inscribe themselves within their own history. The analyst, on their part, acquires a clearer pattern of the analysand’s vital repetitions and sees their true identity appear.
An "under the microscope" psychoanalysis
Thanks to a session rhythm which facilitates free associations, the person on the couch can recount and describe their current and past story down to the smallest detail.
The aim of this method is to bring about, re-living them, the emergence of the experiences, desires, and emotions of the pre-natal period and infancy. Indeed, because they have been repressed in the unconscious, we repeat them throughout our lives without realising it, most often to our disadvantage, as in the case of neurosis.