Psychodynamics is a branch of psychiatry that deals with unconscious as well as conscious phenomena.
When one is confronted by a feeling or experience that is intolerable or unacceptable, the event is pushed into the unconscious mind and becomes unavailable for ordinary conscious consideration.
Much psychoanalytical research has provided a variety of methods for discovering the content of the unconscious mind, the most reliable of which is transference. Transference is the displacement of unconscious events, past and present, onto personalities in current relationships. The trained therapist, who invariably becomes an object of the transference, would have in his possession the best evidence of the content of the unconscious mind.
For instance, adolescents who have difficult relationships with their parents are often unable to tolerate their feelings about parents whom they love, yet who also create in them feelings of distress and anger. These unacceptable feelings are frequently pushed into the unconscious mind, where they have a life of their own, affecting the youngster all the time. These emotions may be acted out or evacuated into the external world – in extreme cases leading to murderous events.
Example
Alan was the product of an extremely violent father and a very loving mother. Alan’s experience as a little boy, till the age of six, was of seeing his father constantly beating his mother. He wanted to do something to stop the beatings, but was too terrified of his father to even articulate a protest. When Alan was six, his mother left his father and got married to a very caring man who had sons of his own around Alan’s age.
All of them had a relatively happy life, since that time and Alan was overtly well. He was a tall good-looking lad doing reasonably well in studies and sports.
At the age of 15 he had been charged with attempted murder when he was referred to me. Alan spoke to me freely and agreed to come as a resident into the psychodynamically-orientated adolescent unit I was running.
He had made a planned attack on another boy and had broken his arm and leg and three ribs. That boy had threatened to beat up a girl who was Alan’s friend.
Because Alan genuinely regretted the incident and had agreed to come in for treatment, the police reduced the charge to Grievous Bodily Harm and the magistrate gave him a conditional discharge.
Discussion
The uppermost feeling Alan had about his mother being constantly beaten up by his father was murderous anger, which he could not tolerate and pushed it into his unconscious mind. He was never given the opportunity to think and talk about his childhood experiences and externalise them – they were too unpleasant for his mother and his new family. They remained in his unconscious mind and when a situation that was similar to his childhood occurred, he transferred onto the girl his feelings about his mother and onto the boy he attacked, his feelings about his father. He then did what he had always wanted to do to his father.
Unpleasant experiences, once lodged in the unconscious mind, and not acted out or dealt with through experiences which bring them out, such as psychoanalytical therapy or thoughtful discussions with a sensitive person (usually trained), cause a strong need to evacuate the unpleasant experience onto another. This is seen commonly in the sexual abuse of a child perpetrated by one who has been sexually abused himself.
If the distressed youngster is subjected to good, safe, caring experiences, the distressing feelings in the unconscious mind may undergo changes which usually render them harmless and acceptable to the youngster and to society.
But if the anger/cruelty towards the youngster is fed through the actions of carers or society at large, or through neglect of the pain they have suffered, then these unconscious forces may fester into determined cruelty and sadism, which may become impossible for the youngster to contain and control.