The world of psychotherapy is awash with its own language and terminology and may be confusing to those looking for help. How do you choose the right sort of help? What distinguishes this more psychoanalytic approach from others?
I hope that exploring the following questions might help you decide:
- What is psychoanalytic psychotherapy?
- How does it aim to help?
- What might you expect
- Practicalities
What is psychoanalytic psychotherapy?Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is a talking therapy that encourages you to develop a deeper understanding of the symptoms, inner conflicts or distressing patterns that inhibit you. These conflicts may be on the ‘outside’ in the form of relationship difficulties, or debilitating anxious behaviour or on the ‘inside’ such as feeling stuck, uncertain, incapacitated by sadness, or chronic anger, or even not knowing what your feelings are.
Some treatments focus on attempting to manage external symptoms but psychoanalytic psychotherapy is more interested in what lies underneath them . You might find yourself exploring your inner and outer worlds both past and present, your culture, gender, sexuality; how you relate to others in the present including how we relate in our sessions together and how this may change over time. We may come to understand this as reflecting earlier patterns within significant attachment relationships.
This form of psychotherapy does not offer magic or false promises but it does hope to stimulate a more creative curiosity about yourself (and others) and a more truthful acceptance of how you feel, think and act.
How does it aim to help?The sort of burdens that people come to psychotherapy with may include:
• Difficulties in making or sustaining relationships
• Depression and chronic irritability or anger
• Fertility and parenting problems
• Debilitating anxiety and panic attacks
• Compulsive or risk taking behaviour
• Sexual problems
• Eating disorders, addictions, self harm
• Difficulties related to loss and bereavement
• Physical symptoms for which there is no clear medical explanation
• Difficulties resulting from trauma, violence or abuse
The feelings that a person may come with may be less specific - a general discomfort inside themselves, perhaps a sense of emptiness. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is based on the belief that it is the hidden, avoided, or rejected aspects of ourselves that leads to inner and outer conflicts. By exploring your thoughts feelings, stories from the past, beliefs in the present, dreams, and fantasies within a secure, confidential, and reliable setting, these more hidden aspects may come to be known. Through the skilled listening, understanding and responsiveness from your therapist, you can develop your own awareness of the more complex aspects of your mind which may be inhibiting you, render them less powerful and allow you to think about them differently, so allowing for change. You can be helped to face the future rather less burdened, and to be more comfortable and at ease with yourself.
Lithograph © Eileen Cooper 2008. All Rights Reserved, DACS
