Louis Breger The therapist
Louis Breger is a therapist who dares to be a quiet revolutionary in the service of psychotherapy. Like all quiet revolutionaries, he is a sensitive arbitrator of nuances. Breger does not abandon his origins, while at the same time he adopts a different approach then the norms and threatens the classic hegemony of therapists – especially Freudian analysts. Furthermore, he seems to have no intention of abandoning the founding “fathers” of “one person psychology” Not the “big father” Freud or “two people’s psychology” whose founding “mother” is Melanie Klein. Indeed, he relies on them both out of respect and in the most basic sense. And it is from here that the path was paved for renewal; in the form of Winnicott’s ‘potential space’ (1996), Kohut (2007) self-psychology, and Benjamin (2013) with the existential paradox between the need to be independent and the need to be recognized by the other.
The intersubjectives see therapy as relationship, which incorporates recognition and mutuality. This form of therapy is aligned with the perspective offered by Stephen Mitchel (2000), who was among the founders of the intersubjective theory. I will elaborate on this further on in this essay.
The ability to feel free of classic psychoanalysis, while also being very much a part of this perspective can only occur when one is in possession of mental strength rooted in a strong personal and professional ego. One that is paired with much professional experience. Above all, it requires a person who has internal freedom, allowing a sense of liberation from theory while at the same time being very much a part of this theoretical foundation. This person relates to his patient not as one who represents one or the other theoretical approaches, but as someone who is deemed worthy of her own inquiry. Breger is able to read his patient Yael’s” mental geography” and agrees to join her on a journey to her self-discovery–knowing that there are things he knows and there are those things that are not visible. But he is curious and open to discovery.
Breger understands his own limitations as an intellectual analyst and a decoder of the internal codes of the person in front of him. Not only according to the DSM, which is obviously in the back of his mind. He sees a woman who is like a leaf blowing in the wind that needs to be able to feel. She needs to first of all feel like a human being, like a woman and like someone who deserves a life she seems to lose. So many profound and basic emotional wounds. Breger brings back some of this loss together with or before the knowledge. He takes into account the person before the theory. This woman before his previous experiences, the woman who she is and what hurts her and what she needs.
Maybe he sees and believes beyond her performance. From here, the therapeutic journey begins and it is impressive, human, and successful. The description of the therapeutic event through the parameters that Yael described is threatening to the reader/therapist. It is threatening in that during this process the patient undergoes change. The therapist himself goes through a series of new choices and thus leaves his shell. In this short essay, I want to try to understand what really allows for a change in therapy, and in what way does the Introspective approach contribute to this. I wish to propose the following title, taken from Ogden, “Intimacy in the realm of formality” (Mitchell 2000 p. 173).
