Many people who experience a loss of meaning in their lives or who are seeking a greater sense of fulfilment may be helped by psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
You will need to have some degree of curiosity about how your mind works in order to benefit from psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic psychotherapy. This motivation is important because psychoanalytic psychotherapy can be uncomfortable as well as rewarding. There will be times that you will need to face up to feelings that you may prefer to forget or not think about.
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy provides a way to gain an understanding of the unconscious processes which take place in our minds and get expressed in our relationships. As you become conscious of these patterns you can develop the capacity to understand and change them – this potential for change frees you to live life more fully and creatively, with gains particularly noted in your love life and work life.
Short term or long term?
Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy are both long term treatments; they are best thought of as long term investments which ask a lot of you in terms of time, emotional energy and money. However, in return for this investment analysis and psychotherapy can bring about deep-seated and long-lasting change in the most important areas of your life.
Sometimes people seek help for specific reasons such as phobias, panic attacks, self harm, eating disorders, sexual dysfunction or addictive or obsessional behaviour related to alcohol, drugs, sex or internet use. At other times people seek help for more general difficulties such as low self esteem, depression, anxiety, emptiness or sadness, unresolved grief, difficulty at work or difficulty in taking satisfaction from relationships or life in general.
Often people come to analysis or psychotherapy after having some counselling or shorter term psychotherapy which, although it may have been helpful, has left them feeling that it did not lead to the fundamental change they were seeking. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is suitable for people who want to look deeper into them-selves in order to make lasting changes.
