Psychoanalysis

The Method

Psychoanalysis is a revealing therapeutic approach that helps patients understand the deep-seated, unconscious causes of their psychological problems. This makes it possible to transform conflicting emotions and the suffering associated with them, build healthy relationships, and generally further develop one’s personality.

Analytical Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis

Analytical psychotherapy, like psychoanalysis, is a so-called “exploratory” form of therapy: The goal is to identify the individual cause of the client’s psychological distress. This search takes the patient back to their past and thus to their most significant relational experiences with their primary caregivers—usually their parents. These early relationships are often marked by insecurities, conflicts, trauma, and the associated emotions. These feelings are painful, shameful, or in some way unpleasant or unacceptable to the person affected and must therefore be repressed or split off. They are thus unconscious; that is, even if we try, we can no longer access them. However, these unconscious impulses continue to operate within us and must be brought under control again and again.

The result is symptoms and behavioral disturbances that cause great distress and significantly impair daily life. In therapy, and through the relationship with the therapist, all of these unconscious issues and the resulting behavioral patterns are carefully brought to the surface, where they can then be identified and discussed, thereby losing their inhibiting effect on our lives.

Analytical psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are practiced in various settings and with varying frequencies. In weekly sessions, the patient and therapist sit across from each other; in high-frequency sessions, the patient lies on the couch and the therapist sits diagonally next to or behind them.

Brief Analytical Therapy

In brief therapy, the focus is on a specific problem—such as test anxiety—which is addressed within a concise treatment period (e.g., 25 sessions). As in long-term analytic therapy, the therapist and patient explore the problem in light of early relational experiences and the associated emotions, which are reenacted in the current relationship between therapist and client.

Empirical studies show that short-term psychoanalytic therapy is an effective approach whose effectiveness is comparable to that of long-term psychoanalytic therapy and other short-term therapeutic approaches.

Psychoanalytic therapy

Psychoanalysis is a revealing therapeutic approach that helps patients understand the deep-seated, unconscious causes of their psychological problems. This makes it possible to transform conflicting emotions and the suffering associated with them, build healthy relationships, and generally further develop one’s personality.

Analytical Couples Therapy

In analytical couples therapy, just as in analytical individual sessions, the therapist identifies the unconscious motives and resulting behavioral patterns of the partners. In this way, the therapist can show the couple that their deeper conflicts often have nothing to do with each other at all, but rather stem from each individual’s past (i.e., childhood) and are, so to speak, reactivated by the other partner within the relationship.

PSYCHOANALYSIS

The Method

Psychoanalysis was discovered by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) in Vienna more than 100 years ago; it was originally referred to as the “talking cure.” Freud is, therefore, the father of all psychotherapies, but he faced strong resistance—which has not subsided even today—because he shed light on “forbidden” areas of the human psyche that Western societies prefer to suppress. In a nutshell, Freud realized that the mental—and often physical—symptoms from which people suffer have psychological meaning, but that meaning is not always easy to accept, for example because of cultural norms. As long as that meaning remains unconscious, the symptoms continue to cause pain and confusion. They prevent us from being able to enjoy life and form meaningful relationships. This is why the main goal of psychoanalysis is to transform the unconscious and bring it into consciousness.

Psychoanalytic therapy

Psychoanalytic therapy provides a safe space that can contain and support the therapeutic process. To make this process emotionally meaningful, sessions are typically held 2–4 times per week. Clients are encouraged to come to sessions without a set agenda and to express whatever comes to mind without censoring anything. Speaking in this way goes against our nature, and it takes time to develop enough trust and to work through emotions such as fear and shame before one can speak freely. Ultimately, this is what enables the therapist to bring different areas of the client’s life into consciousness: past and present, waking and sleeping (dream interpretation), thinking and feeling, real relationships and fantasies.