The goal of psychoanalytic psychotherapy is to replace unconscious actions, impulses, emotions, and feelings with conscious ones. In collaboration with a psychotherapist, the client begins to better understand his motives, desires and fears, thus becoming more effective in managing them.
Psychodynamic therapy helps to:
— overcoming heavy emotional stress;
— restoring the ability to self-manage psychological problems;
— to know your past better in order to improve yourself in the future.
Psychodynamic (psychoanalytic) psychotherapy
Psychoanalytic theory helps bring awareness to conflicts, fears, or unconscious internal motivations. In a state of flow and association, the client releases his thoughts, showing the psychotherapist his unconscious, what has been hidden in the mind but has not had a chance to surface.
As soon as the psychodynamic direction reaches the point of touching the unconscious, the psychotherapist begins to interpret carefully, with assumptions, in order to make therapeutic progress.
Freud’s psychoanalytic theory
Developed by Sigmund Freud, this theory explores the unconscious and its influence on our lives, thoughts, opinions and behaviour. Freudian psychoanalysis emphasizes that the unconscious plays a significant role in our lives, and to ignore it in working with the client is to ignore a part of his personality.
Psychoanalysis is the study of the unconscious mind, its first and strongest “walls” being put up in childhood. The client’s past is studied, as well as the impact of those events on the present. Working with the unconscious mind takes time and effort to rebuild the psyche, to feel the influence of this unconscious and to become a happy and whole person.
The methods of psychoanalysis
Over the years, the development of this method of psychotherapy has led to the creation of many methods and strategies to reveal the influence of the unconscious on the client’s life. For example:
- free association: the client says whatever comes to mind, escaping the internal filter and censorship. In this way, a person escapes the influence of the conscious mind and begins to discover his subconscious;
- transmission: the client transmits to the therapist his most important emotions, beliefs or feelings related to important people;
- dream interpretation
