Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy is an intimate partnership, in the course of which the patient becomes aware of the underlying sources of his/her difficulties not simply intellectually, but emotionally, by re-experiencing them with the analyst.
The person best able to undergo psychoanalytic psychotherapy may have already achieved important satisfactions with friends, in marriage, in work, or through special interests and hobbies, but is nonetheless significantly impaired by longstanding symptoms: depression or anxiety, sexual incapacities, or physical symptoms without any demonstrable underlying physical cause. One person may be plagued by private rituals, compulsions, or repetitive thoughts of which no one else is aware.
Another may live a constricted life of isolation and loneliness, incapable of feeling close to anyone. A victim of childhood sexual abuse might suffer from an inability to trust others. Some people come to therapy due to repeated failures in work or in love, brought about not by chance, but by self-destructive patterns of behavior. Others need therapy because the way they are – their character – substantially limits their choices and their pleasures.
Whatever the problem – and each is different – that a person brings to the therapist, it can be properly understood only within the context of that person’s strengths and life situation.
The goal of psychoanalytic psychotherapy is not so much to suppress symptoms as to understand them, and because, as their meanings become clear, symptoms tend to resolve spontaneously. Psychoanalysis requires significant commitments of time, money, and emotional engagement, but leads over time to a new sense of freedom, responsibility, depth, and meaningfulness in life. It provides individuals with insights into their interpersonal relationships and patterns of relating to others.
Through the therapeutic relationship, adults in therapy gain new awareness regarding their difficulties and build and strengthen healthy ways of coping with stress.
I work with adults on a wide variety of personal growth goals, including: