Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy explores issues in depth and may be long-term. It makes use of the idea that how you behave now is determined by past experiences and relationships.

A psychoanalytic psychotherapist aims to uncover unconscious factors that may underlie your problems. The presence of unconscious factors means that the advice of others or self-help books, while logical and rational, fails to provide relief. This is not because you do not understand the advice given but because there is something else at work that keeps you repeating old patterns.

You will explore and begin to make sense of your existing situation as well as the feelings, thoughts, beliefs, behaviours and memories that are brought about by this situation. Some of those thoughts, feelings and behaviours may have affected your life negatively and make you feel to be ‘out of control’, confused, helpless, hopeless, exhausted, anxious, sad, frustrated or angry.

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy offers very useful principles which aid to shed light on those ‘other’ unconscious factors at work. It aims at enabling you to explore and analyse ‘irrational’ feelings, thoughts and behaviours in order to gain a deeper understanding of how you relate to yourself and to others. Psychotherapeutic work can help you to gradually free yourself from old repetitive patterns by showing how unconscious factors can affect your current ways of living and how you can deal better with the demands of adult life.