Working through is the stage of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic therapy in which an insight is revisited, felt and tested again and again until it changes how you live, not just what you know. It explains why one good session rarely fixes an old pattern. In everyday English “working through” means dealing with something step by step; this entry covers the therapy meaning.
Also called: working-through (with a hyphen, as in Freud’s title); durcharbeiten (the German original); in other therapies, “consolidation” or “integration”.
How it works
Freud introduced the term in a 1914 paper, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through”. His point was simple. People tend to repeat in action what they cannot remember or face: the same kind of argument, the same choice of partner, the same way of giving up. When the therapist names the pattern, or the resistance to looking at it, the naming does not make it stop. The person needs time to get to know the pattern, catch it as it happens, and overcome it by carrying on with the work despite it. Freud called this hard going for the person and a test of patience for the analyst.
In practice, working through looks like this:
- An insight arrives: “I go silent when I’m hurt, the way I did with my father.”
- The pattern comes back anyway, in your marriage, at work, and often with the therapist (the transference).
- Each time, you and the therapist notice it sooner, feel what is under it, and see what it protects you from.
- Slowly the old defence loosens, and new choices become possible without effort.
Later analysts stressed that the feeling has to come with the understanding. Knowing why you do something, in words only, changes little. Working through joins the two.
Examples
- A man knows his fury at his manager is partly old anger at a harsh father. He still explodes. Over months he learns to spot the first flush of heat, pause, and answer as an adult rather than a cornered boy.
- A woman who says yes to every request, because as a child refusing meant losing love, practises saying no in small ways, feels the fear each time, and finds that nobody leaves.
- Someone grieving a parent revisits the loss at each milestone, the burial, the first Christmas, the memorial, and each return hurts a little less and makes more sense.
In Nigeria
Full psychoanalysis, several sessions a week for years, is rare in Nigeria. Psychodynamic ideas, though, run through much of the therapy offered here, and working through happens in any therapy that lasts more than a few sessions. It is also why therapists ask you to keep coming when you feel the point has been made. Many people, and many families, expect one conversation, one prayer or one deliverance to settle things for good; when the problem returns, they read it as failure. In therapy the return is expected. It is the material.
Working through vs abreaction vs insight
An abreaction is a single, intense release of emotion tied to a memory. Insight is the understanding of a pattern. Working through is the slow, repeated use of that understanding until the pattern changes. Freud moved from the first to the third: he found that the release on its own did not last, and that resistance had to be worked with, not bypassed. The modern evidence agrees: lasting change comes from practice over time, whether the therapy is psychoanalytic or cognitive behavioural.
When to get help
If you keep ending up in the same place, in relationships, at work or with your family, and understanding it has not changed it, longer-term therapy is worth considering. You can browse licensed therapists on Mytherapist.ng and ask at the first session whether they work in a psychodynamic way. If you are in crisis now, call 112 (or 767 in Lagos), or Safe Place Nigeria on 0800 800 2000. The full list is on our helplines page.
Read next
This entry is awaiting clinical review. It’s based on published research and health guidelines, and we’ll update it once a clinician has reviewed it.
List of terms
- therapy
- fear
- psychoanalysis
- deliverance