Intellectualization - During Therapy

During Therapy

In analysis, 'a certain kind of resistance consists in the patient always being reasonable and refusing to have any understanding for the logic of emotions', while at the same time there are 'intellectual resistances in which patients try to refute the theoretical validity of psychoanalysis instead of seeking to clarify their own mental life'. Again, Freud found that there were 'patients who practice the art of sheering off into intellectual discussion...who speculate a great deal and often very wisely about their condition and in that way avoid doing anything to overcome it'.

Such intellectualizations of the therapy may be part of wider manic defences 'of overwhelming importance, since they are primarily directed against the experience of psychic reality, that is, against the whole aim of the analytical process'; while a further difficulty may be that, as intellectual defences give way and feelings do emerge, 'the patients, not accustomed to affects, are easily frightened by their new experiences'.

On the other hand, it may possibly be a technical error on the part of the therapist which 'deflects from the patient's experience of feelings towards thinking about feelings...This invites the patient to intellectualise'. The result may be intellectual but not emotional insight: 'Intellectual insight is usually classified as an OBSESSIONAL DEFENCE since it enables the subject to understand and control elements of himself from which he remains alienated'.

Nevertheless, despite all such difficulties, Jung may have been overly harsh when he said that ' the most difficult as well as the most ungrateful patients...are the so-called intellectuals...the intellectual still suffers from a neurosis if feeling is undeveloped'.