Psychoanalysis helps people understand painful symptoms, modify difficult interpersonal relationships and improve troubling moods and ineffective work habits. It is a dynamic psychotherapeutic treatment. It involves intensive verbal therapy with a trained psychoanalyst, allowing a person to reveal thoughts and feelings more fully and encourage self-inquiry.
Individuals are often only partially aware of factors that determine their emotions and behavior. These unconscious elements, sometimes related to history or trauma, may create symptoms, troubling personality traits, difficulties in work or love relationships, or disturbances in mood and self-esteem. Psychoanalytic treatment allows the understanding of these symptoms, their development, both historically and in the present, in order to deal better with emotions, relationships and life’s realities. Analysis is an intimate inquiry to uncover the sources of difficulties, which can often be re-experienced within this trusted relationship. The patient lies on a couch, four or five times weekly, attempting to say whatever comes to mind. In the course of the work, feelings, memories, dreams, unconscious ideas surface, which describe more fully the patient’s experience of self. The analyst helps elucidate repetitive patterns, understand historical development, and talk about difficult topics. The patient wrestles repeatedly with the feelings and insights that emerge, from different angles. The joint efforts of patient and analyst modify difficult life patterns and incapacitating symptoms, expanding the freedom to work and to love. Eventually, the patient’s behavior, relationships, sense of self, and life, can change in deep and abiding ways.