ABSTRACT
The different ways of reaching a patient can only be understood in terms of links. In terms of learning, therapists could say that the therapeutic process consists essentially in breaking the vicious circle so as to facilitate subjects’ opening to external world. When the basic anxiety is agoraphobia, that is, fear of open spaces, subjects cannot acquire knowledge or learn; their stereotyped, regressive behavior only allows them to reach a neurotic equilibrium because they respond in the same way to every stimulus. Introspective psychology focuses on the observer’s internal emergent, which expresses a relationship or a particular link with an internal object. This link may be more or less affected by the external situation in therapeutic field, but rarely takes this situation into account. In this case, interpretations are essentially developed on the basis of the observer’s internal situation. The psychoanalytic method uses rational observation and free association, which are both part of an activity called creative or re-creative imagination.
