“What is it you say you do?” A brief explanation of psychodynamic therapy and contemporary psychoanalysis.

There are truly a myriad of psychotherapies to choose from in 2025. Psychoanalytic and psychodynamic therapies are less well known than CBT and its offshoots, which dominate the field today. Therefore my approach may require a bit more explanation. Let me introduce my psychoanalytic theoretical underpinnings and how they guide my work, in the hopes that you may gain some clarity:

1.       The unconscious. The basic assumption of the existence of the unconscious mind is that to a large extent, we are not in control.

2.       Transference. The concept of transference is traced back to Freud, and encompasses a range of unconscious processes that emerge over time in psychoanalytic treatment. Transference can be thought of as expectations we all have for relationships, that we act out repeatedly and on a constant basis whether we are in a therapy session or not. These expectations are largely based on attachments with early caregivers, and also reflect all relationships in our subsequent history. Psychoanalytic therapy provides opportunities to examine transference and its accompanying behaviours, since the automatic exercise of transference can prevent people from seeing their role in their own problematic and limiting interpersonal patterns, and with a skilled therapist the automatic transferences can be reworked into more adaptive expectations that will lead to healthier relationships that better meet the patient’s needs.

3.       Two-person psychology. Conventional clinical psychology assumes an individual mind; we are all minds in isolation that operate …. Contemporary psychoanalytic thinking adopts the additional theory that in the analytic relationship, and others in life, both minds are interconnected and influence each other bidirectionally in complex and surprising ways we are just beginning to understand. Thinking about what is occurring between two minds simultaneously across time, as a unit, is a radically different way of understanding emotion, connection, and psychotherapy process and mechanisms of change.

4.       Attachment theory and the procedural unconscious. This means that the ways you and I relate, in obvious and more subtle, both verbal and nonverbal ways, present frequent possibilities for healing and growth.

5.        Relational trauma.