Working with Resistance and Grieving Issues in Psychoanalytic Coaching as a Tool for Overcoming the “Financial Ceiling”

In psychoanalytic coaching work, the client makes a request for real change related to the limitations in overcoming the "financial ceiling", where they encounter resistance in understanding and integrating it into real life, as early physical and symbolic losses have not been "accepted" and realised. The aim of this paper is to examine the 'financial ceiling' as a form of resistance to further development and financial achievement. The tasks set in the theoretical part of the paper are: to analyse and develop metapsychological psychoanalytic concepts related to the work of grief; to consider the symbolic function of money in a psychoanalytic context; to investigate the problems of grieving at the stages of psychosexual development and its influence on the formation of fixations that form the "financial ceiling"; to identify the possibilities of the psychoanalytic coaching method for working with business issues related to the formation of the "financial ceiling" and resistance to overcoming it. The empirical objectives include: to show, using case examples from the personal coaching practice of the authors of the paper, how the barriers forming the "financial ceiling" were discovered and labelled for clients' awareness; to trace the dynamics of resistance to change in psychoanalytic and its overcoming in psychoanalytic coaching. The result of the work is a study in psychoanalytic coaching of work with three clients, the material is supplemented with observations of the researchers. The Appendix contains parts of the conducted sessions demonstrating examples of application of methods of identification, prediction and working through resistance based on the psychoanalytical approach The presented work has practical significance for psychoanalytically oriented specialists. Certain aspects of this work may be useful for psychoanalytic coaches to understand the dynamics of the process within sessions.