Working Through

Working Through occupies a pivotal position in depth-psychological discourse, originating in Freud’s 1914 paper ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’ and ramifying across virtually every subsequent school of practice. The term names the labour — affective, cognitive, somatic, and relational — by which insight secured in a single moment of recognition is gradually assimilated into the whole personality. Resistance is its necessary counterpart: without resistance there is nothing to work through, and the pacing of the work is determined by the client’s capacity to sustain contact with what has been defended against. Welwood reframes the concept as a bidirectional, Gendlin-inflected process in which a ‘felt sense’ is both consulted and carried forward, challenging the older deterministic model of uncovering stored contents. Grof extends the domain to non-ordinary states, arguing that working through unconscious material in LSD-assisted therapy can also involve dramatic gestalt-shifts in experiential relevance rather than mere content excavation. Trauma theorists from Herman to Levine and Ogden stage working through as a phased enterprise, with somatic discharge and integrative processing preceding narrative reconstruction. Dayton and the ACA tradition embed the term in a relational-recovery frame, emphasising that resolving past issues liberates present relationships. Across these divergent lineages, working through remains the irreducible concept linking interpretation to change.

In the library 10 passages

This understanding of therapeutic working-through as a two-way interactive process—referring inwardly to a felt sense and then carrying it forward through inquiry and unfolding—provides a more dynamic and liberating model of therapy than the one-way street of making the unconscious conscious.

Welwood redefines working-through as a bidirectional, embodied process of felt-sense consultation and unfolding, explicitly contrasting it with deterministic uncovering models.

Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000thesis

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in addition to working through unconscious material, the LSD procedure can also involve dramatic shifts of focus that change its experiential relevance.

A parallel formulation to the above, reinforcing Grof’s argument that working through encompasses gestalt-level shifts in psychic illumination, not only graduated content assimilation.

Grof, Stanislav, LSD Psychotherapy: Exploring the Frontiers of the Hidden Mind, 1980supporting

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In working through this experience, which reestablished her running reflexes, she opened her eyes… ‘I thought it was fear that gets you through… but it’s not… It’s something more powerful, something much bigger than fear.’

Levine illustrates somatic working through as the restoration of thwarted biological action sequences, with the client’s insight emerging from bodily completion rather than verbal interpretation.

Levine, Peter A., In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting

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Sigmund Freud, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through,’ in vol. 12 of Standard Edition… p. 150.

Epstein’s citation anchors the concept in its Freudian source text, placing it as the foundational reference for the chapter on repetition in a Buddhist-psychoanalytic synthesis.

Epstein, Mark, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective, 1995supporting

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the extent to which the group leader is aware and able to identify the source of the resistances determines whether these resistances will be resolved or worked through.

Flores situates working through resistances as the central therapeutic task in group psychotherapy, contingent on the leader’s capacity to identify and engage resistances in the here and now.

Flores, Philip J, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997supporting

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working through our core recovery issues… Stage Two work include: 1) realizing our True Self, 2) grieving our ungrieved hurts, losses, and traumas, 3) finding and fulfilling our healthy needs.

The ACA framework operationalises working through as a multi-year Stage Two recovery process encompassing grief, trauma resolution, and authentic self-development.

INC , ACA WSO, ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES, 2012supporting

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working through in See also Bare attention

An index cross-reference in Epstein’s text places working through in explicit associative proximity to bare attention, signalling its integration into a Buddhist-psychoanalytic vocabulary.

Epstein, Mark, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective, 1995aside

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Related terms