WHAT IS PSYCHOANALYSIS?

Psychoanalysis is a highly effective psychological treatment that can improve the lives we lead by addressing unconscious struggles that are influencing our daily life.

Psychoanalytic treatment consists of meeting for sessions with an analyst on a regular basis, for fifty minutes each time. This stable, confidential structure gives you and your analyst the chance to connect with and understand what is happening at a deeper level.

Psychoanalysis requires meeting four or five times each week, whereas psychotherapeutic work entails less frequent meetings. Both psychotherapy and psychoanalysis can bring about authentic and lasting change, even when working with substantial emotional difficulties. We can discuss together what frequency of meeting best suits your needs.

Psychoanalysis might also include lying on a couch. The couch has played a part in analytic treatment since its earliest days, with patients lying down, facing away from the analyst. The idea behind it is that, in order to encourage free association – saying whatever comes into your mind during an analytic session, without censorship – it is easier to be facing away from your analyst.

You might find some similarity in the way it can be easier to share your feelings with a friend or relative when not looking straight at them, say when you are sitting next to them in the car. Although some people find that lying down helps them to get into a space conducive to the analytic process, others find it more helpful to sit in a chair. This is something we can discuss together when meeting.

At the heart of this work is the sentiment that our internal world is complex and because our emotional world is often unconscious we sometimes we don’t understand the beliefs and fears that influence how we feel, what we see and how we experience and relate to the world around us. We can find ourselves repeating destructive behaviours, feeling stuck in unhappy relationships and stunted in our emotional, creative and professional development.

By gradually exploring those complexities together in psychoanalysis or psychotherapeutic work, psychological suffering can be reduced and health and wellbeing improved.