About Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy provides a safe, confidential space in which to talk, where the patient can speak freely and without judgment. Patients can bring anything they choose to the session; the therapeutic space is designed to allow them to free-associate about anything they wish. Psychotherapy is a journey undertaken by the psychotherapist and patient together; we work to gain a better understanding of the patient’s inner self. Doing so allows the patient to manage their feelings better, and to have a more thoughtful relationship with themselves and others.

People seek psychotherapy for several reasons. They might want to make changes to their lifestyle, learn how to better manage the challenges that they face in their day-to-day lives, or improve how they feel about themselves.

Those who choose to come to psychotherapy do so for different reasons, but they stay in psychotherapy because, on a fundamental level, they want to have a deeper relationship with themselves. Moreover, they want to understand why they are the way that they are, and to understand their emotional world better.

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy works with the mind - specifically, with the unconscious: a force that is outside our conscious awareness, and whose influence on our conscious mind often goes unnoticed. As an example, we may find ourselves compulsively repeating certain behaviours that, consciously, we don’t like, and want to put a stop to. In the therapeutic work, we hope to uncover and understand the unconscious source of this repetition, so that we can work it through, and so that it can no longer find expression in harmful behaviours. We also work with deep-seated patterns, and deeper relational models, which the patient perhaps observes in their day-to-day life, but struggles to understand.

The therapeutic space provides a safe place in which to talk and think with a psychotherapist, where the patient can hope to learn why they feel and behave the way that they do. Additionally, it can help the patient face challenging thoughts, feelings, and experiences that they may have been trying to avoid.

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is a collaborative process; the psychotherapist does not tell the patient what to do. Rather, the psychotherapist and patient explore and work together. A patient might have been encouraged to come to therapy initially for a specific reason, but their objective might change once they see the ongoing benefits of staying in long-term psychotherapy.