Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy are depth-oriented forms of treatment that go beyond managing symptoms of psychic distress such as anxiety, depression, panic, to name a few.
We work with the whole of your inner life. This includes the feelings, thoughts, and dreams you're aware of, as well as the deeper, as-yet-unknown-but-present patterns that can lead to repetitions, repeated failures or feeling 'stuck' in life. By understanding these inner conflicts, unmet needs, as they are lived in the therapy process, we create a path to healing that is both profound and stable.
Much of what drives our choices, relationships, and suffering lies outside ordinary awareness. Psychoanalytic work creates conditions in which unconscious material can gradually become conscious, through the patient's own exploration in the presence of an attuned therapist.
The therapist helps foster a confidential, non-judgmental and supportive environment for the patient, within which an open and authentic self exploration can take place.
The relationship between patient and therapist is not incidental. It is itself the medium of change also. Feelings that arise in the room, including dependency, frustration, admiration, or indifference, are explored and understood rather than avoided.
Rather than targeting symptoms as problems directly, psychoanalytic work seeks to understand what symptoms really mean, how they protect us, and how they express what cannot be put into words yet. Symptoms tend to ease and transform when the underlying feelings are lived and their meaning is understood.
Psychoanalysis in its classical form is intensive, this would mean typically three to four sessions a week. This high frequency deepens the work and allows the unconscious to speak more freely. Sessions can be face-to-face or on the couch, decided mutually in initial consultations.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy applies the same theoretical frame of unconscious processes, and free association, but takes place at a lower frequency, usually once or twice weekly. It is a rigorous and transformative treatment in its own right, responding and working with constraints that contemporary life may bring.