Psychoanalysis is a method of treating emotional difficulties to gain insight into the individual’s inner world and how it affects his or her emotions, behavior, and relationships. This treatment is based on the idea that people are frequently motivated by unrecognized wishes and desires that originate in one’s unconscious. These can be identified through the relationship between patient and analyst. By listening to patients’ stories, fantasies, and dreams, as well as discerning how patients interact with others, psychoanalysts offer a unique perspective that friends and relatives might be unable to see.
Psychoanalysis is about understanding the key elements of emotional expression and relationship patterns formed during our early life. Our relationships with our parents, siblings, and culture carry forward into adulthood and shape how we experience ourselves today. Past is every present in our daily life. Psychoanalysis offers a method for accessing these underlying emotions and relationships that allows us to transform from the inside rather than focusing on the external relationships or the outside world. The psychoanalyst highlights the connections between the patient’s past and current life. Over time, many of the patient’s characteristic ways of approaching relationships will reveal themselves in how they respond to the analyst’s presence – this is what psychoanalysis calls “the transference,” Which is the patient’s unconscious redirection of feelings from one person to another. These unconscious ways of thinking and feeling, which link together in circuitous ways, influence our behavior as well as our perception of ourselves and others. It is not just our life experiences that shape us. Even more importantly, our current style of thinking influences how we act and the decisions we make.
By paying attention to the transference, the analyst and patient can see how problematic patterns take shape in real time and find new ways of relating to the world. Patients can feel greater freedom and confidence in their relationships as the analysis progresses. Troubling emotions become less dominant, and there is an increasing sense of creativity and spontaneity. Typically, psychoanalysis involves the patient coming several times (3 to 5 times) a week and communicating as openly and freely as possible. While more frequent sessions deepen and intensify the treatment, frequency of sessions is worked out between the patient and analyst. The use of the couch is encouraged to allow the analyst and patient to develop a collaborative thinking space in which new thoughts may emerge.
Psychodynamic Psychotherapy
The framework of psychodynamic psychotherapy is developed out of the techniques and theory of psychoanalysis. This approach has been given many names, such as “deep therapy,” “talk therapy,” “the talking cure,” and/or “psychoanalytic psychotherapy.” In general, the treatment begins by first developing a trusting relationship with a skilled and compassionate therapist.
The focus of the therapy is directed toward exploring and understanding the issues that initially prompted the search for treatment. The treatment includes developing ways to manage troublesome or painful symptoms. Gradually the scope of the work would move toward a thorough exploration of past relationships and events, particularly those of childhood. Childhood experiences shape the sense-of-self, which becomes the lens through which all subsequent relationships are seen and acted upon. Much of what we believe about ourselves is created out of an attempt to make sense of early, perhaps troubling or confusing relationships. By revisiting the past with a compassionate therapist, much can be gained toward healing the mind.
Unconscious conflicts can cause anxiety, moodiness, or depressive thoughts; troubling personality traits; or difficulties at work or in finding or maintaining long-term relationships. Many such problems have their roots in past experiences and relationships. Psychoanalysis seeks to bring troubling unconscious forces into conscious awareness and identify underlying problematic patterns and behaviors. With the insights gained during analysis, the patient can work at improving relationships and productivity, interrupt self-defeating or self-destructive patterns, and perhaps even unlock creative potential.