What is psychodynamic therapy?

 

The central premise of psychodynamic psychotherapy is this:  there is something to gain from talking regularly with someone whose training and experience allow for a kind of listening and understanding rarely available in everyday life. Beyond working through specific problems, it helps you become understand parts of your mind which operate outside your awareness. These unconscious features of ourselves have tremendous influence over our thoughts, feelings and behavior.  Left unexamined they can cause suffering of all kinds.

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What issues can I bring to therapy?

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Psychotherapy can help with many different issues.  Some of the issues I work with most frequently are:

• Anxiety

• Depression

• Trauma, loss, and grief

• Relationship problems

• Life transitions

• LGBTQIA+ issues

• Chronic pain or illness

• Self-compassion

• Career concerns

• Creative difficulties

 

 

How does psychodynamic psychotherapy work?

 

While this kind of therapy is very much concerned with the present, it also concerns itself with how current situations, patterns, and relationships are shaped by past experiences and early attachments. We will focus our shared attention and curiosity on your feelings, beliefs, memories, traumas, hopes, and dreams. Even seemingly irrelevant passing thoughts and the relationship that develops between us as therapist and client will be a means to our ends of helping you understand and heal yourself.

 

Once or twice a week therapy is common.  Sometimes, however, a more intensive treatment --sometimes referred to as psychoanalysis or simply analysis-- is called for.  In this case, sessions take place three, four, or five times a week. There is no single type of person or problem psychoanalysis is best for, but it can be especially useful when difficulties are more long-standing and deeply rooted your personality and ways of being in the world. Psychoanalysis can be right for someone who starts at once a week then wants to deepen the work or if you want to feel more supported and freer to reveal their most troubling thoughts.

 

 

What will I gain from therapy?

 

Whatever the frequency, psychodynamic therapy involves a unique setting, circumstance, and partnership through which remarkable personal development is possible. Self-awareness can flourish, psychic can be reduced, and trauma can be healed. Your coping, decision-making, and interpersonal skills can each grow flexible and strong. And you can achieve far greater satisfaction and pleasure from work, love, and play.

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How do I get started?

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I offer psychoanalytic therapy and psychoanalysis in person in San Francisco and by secure video in California and New York. I welcome individuals of all identities and backgrounds and have particular experience working with LGBTQIA+ clients. To ask a question or set up a first consultation, please reach out.