What would Freud say about the Andic case?

Through the media, the false belief has circulated that the supposed Andic therapy was psychoanalytic in orientation. Recent publications also state that the therapist intended to influence the economic relationship between father and son, trying to convince the father to give the son a large sum of money to resolve the conflict between them. It has also been published that the therapist had made it a condition for the father to carry out this donation in favor of the son if he wanted to continue with the treatment.

Let's be clear: all of this is radically incompatible with psychoanalysis.

In the beginning, Freud used hypnosis as an extreme method of influence to cure people. However, he soon concluded that the doctor's directives did not resolve patients' conflicts, but rather, on the contrary, entrenched their pathologies. Instead of discovering the causes of their discomfort, understanding them, and overcoming them, their symptoms were exacerbated. For this reason, psychoanalytic therapy abdicated, from the outset and forever, from the direction of consciences. Psychoanalysis does not aim to command people's lives or turn them into successful individuals adapted to the beliefs and ideals of the therapist or the era. Each person, through speech, discovers what lies beyond their own symptom, seeking possible options to get by in life. Some symptoms, in fact, are related to an experience of rivalry between siblings, parents, and mothers. In "

The Family Novel of the Neurotic" (1909), Freud pointed out that the family, in the unconscious, is a representation. Each person constructs a fiction about who their parents, siblings, and, above all, their forgotten childhood are. This fiction, neurosis accentuates it in an impossible position: the fault lies with others, and I am the victim. All these issues emerge thanks to psychoanalytic work.

In Catalonia, we have had a long tradition of psychoanalysis, from the early 20th century with Emili Mira and Ramón Sarró, through the work of Francesc Tosquelles (who has been much discussed thanks to the work of Joana Masó published by Arcàdia in 2021), as well as the role of Júlia Corominas, Pere Bofill and Pere Folch, up to institutional stabilization with democracy, in the eighties-nineties, through the various schools that have been created in the country: the Societat Catalana de Psicoanàlisi and the Escola Lacaniana de Psicoanàlisi de Catalunya, among others.

Psychoanalysis includes a critical perspective towards a narcissistic society, self-absorbed, which prefers a coach (the word means trainer) to tell it what to do rather than daring to know the cause of the anguish that inhabits it and how to get out of it. That's why we can think about what Freud would say about the Andic case: that there is nothing in what is said about the supposed Andic therapy that responds to the principles and experience of psychoanalysis.