Psychoanalytic Speech: A Personal Language for Relieving Malaise

Part of what makes psychoanalysis a uniquely productive therapy for working through the forms of malaise that popular diagnostic labels like “ADHD” only begin to describe is its willingness to ask what these terms mean for each individual person, couple, or family—and to try to draw connections between these psychological labels and the lived experience and thought of the particular person(s) pursuing treatment. With psychoanalysis, what often starts off as a kind of internet-driven act of self-labeling carried out by a person in distress is routinely transformed into an inquiry about their own unique history, family, and way(s) of experiencing the world. Psychoanalysis consists of following that inquiry through to a point at which a person’s way of living their suffering has been significantly reoriented.