psychoanalytic psychotherapy as a process
WHAT IS IT?
Psychoanalysis started with the discoveries of Sigmund Freud a century ago. Its methods have changed and developed since then but the psychoanalytic psychotherapy process is still based on the idea that to talk about our feelings and thoughts and to put them into words is therapeutic.
psychoanalytic psychotherapy aims to influence deeper layers of the personality at the source of the person’s difficulties.
It is a process which is based on the observation that we manage painful feelings and difficult thoughts by putting them out of our mind, as a way of getting rid of them.
The therapeutic process aims to help increase our awareness of this, and to see how this has been influencing our day-to-day life.
This approach does not provide a ‘quick fix’ solution. Emotional pain and suffering is very real and often enduring, affecting the nature and quality of our relationships, how we function at work and how we organised our day-to-day life. But suffering can be understood and when the causes are identified and made sense of it becomes possible to decrease or even bring to an end the habits of mind, which perpetuate suffering. This therapeutic approach takes time.
