PSYCHOANALYSIS involves meeting 3-5 DAYS PER WEEK and usually over a period of time measured in years. Some find the couch very helpful, others sit up in a chair. The special atmosphere created by the analytic method makes a deep form of emotional learning possible. This talk-therapy can promote healing as well as growth in your humanity by engaging our new relationship in work on old dysfunctional relationships from the past.
Creating a special space around our words, memories, dreams and thoughts/feelings allows us to better understand ourselves and eventually transform trauma and loss into higher levels of creative functioning. Finding your voice often means discovering your own words for desires, anxieties, memories, emotions, secrets or fantasies that had eluded words in your previous life. In the process, most Analysands eventually find their self enlivened with vitality while their experience in work, love, play, and worship become more meaningful and productive.
For many people, psychoanalysis is a great choice for promoting the capacity to live in the present moment and mindfully love others as yourself in new and surprising ways. While precise outcomes are difficult to predict, my experience has been that eventually new opportunities will become visible to you, including the energy and confidence to act in the world in new ways.
PSYCHODYNAMIC PSYCHOTHERAPY in my practice usually occurs 1-2 DAYS A WEEK. It can be short- or long-term in length. Similar but less intensive than psychoanalysis it is insight-oriented and uses the distress, dreams, fantasies, and desires that are manifest in your words, body and behavior. Most participants find that they benefit from putting language on past experiences in order to increase awareness, acceptance, and understanding. This form of therapy tends to focus more on the immediate and the acute symptoms with a goal of remedying a problem of specific focus. If you desire, this can develop into psychoanalysis.