What is Psychoanalysis?

Psychoanalysis differs from other forms of talk therapy in that it aims to bring parts of ourselves that lay outside of our awareness to consciousness. By bringing our unconscious thoughts, feelings, fantasies, wishes and fears to light, we are better able to gain insight into our behavior. Becoming more aware of what is happening inside of us and how it drives our behavior empowers us to gain control over our behavior and shapes interactions with others in our daily lives. It allows us to take responsibility for our own behavior and begin to experiment with new ways of being in the world. If these patterns of behavior remain outside of our awareness, it is as if we are living life on autopilot. We just remain stuck in a pattern, feeling frustrated, just wishing that we were able to be masters of our own destiny.

Another popular method of talk therapy, CBT or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, focuses on one’s patterns of thinking. In CBT, one might commonly hear that “feelings aren’t facts.” Psychoanalysis does not prioritize thinking over feelings, as feelings are an essential and unescapable force that shapes human behavior. One does not find a spouse or partner from a place of thought; one “falls in love” and chooses a partner based on how they feel about their partner. One may “think” that they have a good job that pays a lot of money and holds a certain social status but may hate their job and want to quit, despite the fact it looks good on paper. A lot of our human experience lies in the world of feeling, such as art, music, and poetry. People take vacations, travel the world, take up hobbies, pursue passions and “follow their dreams” not out of rational thought but because they derive a sense of pleasure from engaging in these activities. The comparison of these two different approaches of therapy are meant to illustrate how psychoanalysis integrates both thinking and feeling into its approach.

Sigmund Freud developed the original theories from which psychoanalysis began over a hundred years ago. Since its conception, it has exploded to many different schools of psychoanalytic thought and approaches to working with patients. My training, Modern Psychoanalysis, draws from all of the different schools of psychoanalytic thought and allows us to be more flexible in working with the individual. Modern Psychoanalysis uses the idea that we meet the individual where they are at, not operating strictly from a diagnoses and treat model, but seeing the entire human being in front of us. It is not driven by a set of moral values, ideology or pre-formed notions of what an individual should want for their life. Instead, Modern Psychoanalysis helps us to use a wide variety of techniques aimed at helping the individual reflect on what is important to them as individuals based on what they bring into therapy and what keeps them in the way of creating a healthy and satisfying life.