Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is a way of working with what you can’t fully know. It leans into those corners of life that resist understanding: slips, repeating patterns, symptoms that return.
You are invited to speak, without censoring, and without aiming for the right answer. Memories, fantasies, relationships, or dreams may emerge, or they may not. The only requirement is that whatever comes, comes. Rather than offering advice or ready-made solutions, psychoanalytic psychotherapy provides a space for something new to emerge; a shift in how we speak, think, and enjoy.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Can Be Helpful When…
-
Sometimes, no matter how much insight we have, we find ourselves caught in the same situations again and again. From falling for someone new but facing the same unavailability or losing our job for the same reason, to yet again waking up hungover despite promises to stop, on the list can go.
Psychotherapy takes these repetitions seriously. Not as failures of will, but as traces of something that is trying to be heard. In listening to those traces, something of its grip on our lives can start to loosen.
-
So many of our symptoms appear irrational to others (anxiety, compulsions, self-sabotage, pain with no clear cause), yet feel absolutely meaningful and real to us. In psychoanalytic psychotherapy, symptoms are approached not as problems to eliminate, but as expressions of something that doesn’t yet have a way to articulate itself. By speaking freely, you may begin to hear the very real logic in these nonsensical symptoms.
-
You might love someone and also feel anger or resentment toward them. You might experience desire, envy, or confusion where you think you shouldn’t. These contradictory and difficult truths live in all of us, and our way of responding to them can shape our relationship with ourselves.
If you're trying to make sense of your life in a way that no other space has allowed, psychotherapy can provide the time, structure, and freedom to do just that. Slowly, seriously, and in your own words.
-
There is no single, standard treatment. Each encounter is shaped by the analyst’s theoretical orientation (what School they belong to) and, more importantly, by their unique relation to the unconscious (what they can hear in another’s speech).
-
Psychoanalysis is not a science in the conventional sense. It doesn’t aim to predict or control behaviour, nor does it offer results that can be measured or replicated across individuals in a standardised way. Instead, it tries to provide a way of listening to that which doesn’t fit into conscious understanding. It pays attention to non-sense i.e., to contradictions, deadlocks, and symptoms that persist even when everything else makes sense.
-
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is open-ended. It continues for as long as it feels necessary, and you are free to stop at any time. There are no fixed contracts or timelines.
Fees are discussed during the preliminary sessions. These early conversations help establish a framework (in terms of time, money, and frequency) that makes the work possible for both parties.
-
Unfortunately, some psychoanalysts (both historically and today) have held problematic or pathologising views of gender and sexuality, but there is nothing in psychoanalytic theory itself that requires these positions.
In fact, one of psychoanalysis’s most fundamental positions is that gender and sexuality are not reducible to biology or norms but are formed in complex, singular ways. Because of this, when psychoanalysis begins to assume who or what someone ‘should’ be, it starts to break away from its own ethical framework, and we should all be cautious towards those theories.
If you’re thinking of starting therapy and have concerns about these issues, it is important and entirely appropriate to bring them up. with. your therapist. That too is part of the work.
-
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy does not follow fixed stages. While some earlier models (like Freud’s psychosexual phases) proposed linear developmental paths, contemporary practice is not concerned with fitting people into theory.
Instead, we begin with the premise that each subject is singular. The work unfolds in response to what is said (and not said) in the analytic space. Because of this, no two treatments look the same, and there is no pre-determined progression or endpoint.