Abstract

**A traditional view of psychotherapy is that psychotherapy is the interactions, both verbal and behavioral, between two subjects. The intention of my thesis is to question the traditional view via post-structuralist approaches. Following the concepts of The Order of Things by Michel Foucault and Mythologies by Roland Barthes, I reveal both the tempo-spatial structure and structured tempo-spatiality of psychoanalysis and object-relation theories. Patients under the psychodynamic gaze are subtracted to be a folded configuration of topologically covalent space with bounds, and of recurrent and return life flow. Therefore, the practices of psychodynamic psychotherapy as a whole is an autonomous system, whose aims are to fold patients into specific tempo-spatial configurations by a sort of patterns and rules. This folding makes patient’s life into a coherent and cohesive narrative, and thus precludes the existence of a shattered and de-centered self without being psychopathologized.

**Besides, psychodynamic psychotherapy shows the dominant power of rationality when therapists deal with the binary opposite words such as “rational/emotional” and “conscious/unconscious”. In order to explore patient’s inner world and to treat the distorted intra-psychic organ, his/her unconscious emotional conflicts need to be objectified and objective, especially when they are destructive. The Objectification and objectivation reflect the desire of psychodynamic theory to see itself as science. In addition, patient’s problems will be transformed into psychodynamic problems by metonymic and synecdochic manipulations which delicately make psychodynamic psychotherapy into a cross-reference symbolic chains which could extend to anywhere as long as therapists wish. Anywhere means nowhere; thus no stable, non-reducible signified could be referred, nor an intra-psychic genesis could be traced back. It is questionable whether psychodynamic psychotherapy could reach the essence of patients.