Key Elements
Our work together emphasizes the role of unconscious thoughts, feelings, and memories in influencing your current behaviour and emotions, examining how your early life experiences, particularly those involving family and caregivers, as well as other significant environmental factors, shaped your personality and behavioural patterns. The goal is to help you gain insight into the emotions and thoughts that are outside your conscious awareness, often through exploring feelings about significant people, places and events. The relationship between therapist and client is crucial, and often reflects old patterns of relating. We work together to explore the defences you use to cope with distress and anxiety, such as repression, denial, or projection.
Techniques
Free Association
Encouraging you to speak freely about whatever comes to mind, which can reveal unconscious thoughts and feelings.
Interpretation
Offering interpretations of your thoughts, feelings, and dreams to uncover underlying unconscious material.
Transference and Countertransference Analysing the transfer of feelings you have about significant people when these come up in the work, as well as my own feelings in response, to develop a better understanding of your inner world.
Dream Analysis Exploring the content of dreams to uncover hidden conflicts and desires.
Exploration of Past Experiences Delving into your history to understand the origins of current psychological issues.
Goals
Self-awareness
Increasing awareness of unconscious processes and how they affect your current behaviour and relationships.
Develop Ego Strength
Building a more robust core 'Self', knowing your identity, your own needs and wants, and being able to give voice to these.
Emotional Growth
Understanding and resolving past conflicts, leading to healthier emotional states.
Improved Relationships Enhancing the ability to form and maintain healthier relationships by understanding past relational patterns.
Duration
Psychodynamic psychotherapy can vary in duration. It may be short-term (several months) for specific issues or long-term (several years) for more deep-seated and complex problems.
By focusing on the deeper, often hidden aspects of the psyche, psychodynamic psychotherapy aims to bring about profound changes in emotional and psychological functioning.