What is Psychoanalytic Therapy?
Psychoanalytic therapy (a term that refers to both psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy) is a treatment for relieving mental and emotional distress. It is based upon the hypothesis that all our actions, thoughts and feelings are influenced by unconscious processes. Disturbances in these processes produce troubling symptoms like anxiety, depression, unusual fears, obsessions etc. People are often able to forget painful experience, an ability that can be a blessing and even vitally necessary in the short run. Trauma, humiliations, seemingly irresolvable conflicts between desires and inhibitions or between differing desires, painful memories – all can be rendered unconscious. But this ability is a mixed blessing. For these things can haunt us. Although forgotten, they can still affect us by disturbing normal unconscious emotional regulation. Symptoms are messages telling us something is wrong. We know today that a fever is a symptom of infection. Yet in times past people misrea
