Psychoanalytic relationships are generated by the desire to find meaning as well as relief from psychological suffering. Different schools of psychotherapy have emerged and continue to develop from Freud's original work. In psychoanalytic psychotherapy, particular attention is paid to analysing transference and resistance issues, so that the patient is helped to find a more creative relationship between conscious and unconscious processes and to discover his/her own personal truths.
Finding a therapist can be through deliberate research, but is crucially a process of discovering the right 'fit' between the two human beings involved. In training, the therapist has also been in the role of patient, providing the commonality of experience which we think lies at the heart of the enterprise. Psychotherapy, whether long or short term, may be with individual clients, with couples or with groups.
Psychoanalytic theory explores the connection between events in early life (which may be unconscious) and current disturbance and distress. The therapy offers a reliable setting for free association to past and present fantasies, feelings, dreams and memories.
Particular attention is given to the developing relationship with the therapist as it is through this that the patient is able to re-experience relationships from his/her early life and explore new ways of relating, freer of the characteristics that previously caused distress. Through this transference relationship, the patient may achieve a new and better resolution of long-standing conflicts and overcome resistances to change and growth.
