What is Psychoanalytic Treatment For?

Sat 05,2025

Addressing Recurrent Issues

Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy help those with recurring psychic problems that hinder happiness and success in relationships, work, and daily life. Anxieties, inhibitions, and depressions often signal inner conflicts that, if untreated, significantly impact personal and professional decisions.

These problems typically have deep roots beyond normal awareness, necessitating psychotherapy for resolution.

Gaining Insight with an Analyst

With the help of an expert analyst, patients can uncover unconscious parts of their disturbances. Talking in a safe environment allows patients to become aware of their inner world, including thoughts, feelings, memories, and dreams, leading to relief from psychic pain, personal development, and increased self-awareness. The positive effects of psychoanalysis endure long after treatment ends.

Talking Cure

Psychoanalysis is a talking cure, based on the method of free association. In its fundamental rule, the patient is invited to say whatever comes to mind without restrictions, like considerations of context, decency, feelings of shame or guilt and other objections. By adhering to this rule the patient’s thought-processes will make surprising links, reveal consciously unavailable connections to wishes and defences, and lead to the unconscious roots of hitherto irresolvable conflicts that shape the transference-occurrences.

Listening to these associations, analysts will surrender to a similar mental process, called free hovering attention, by which they are following the patient’s communications as well as noticing – at times as if in a waking dream – their own associations as they emerge in the counter-transference.

How does it work?

The integration of these various kinds of information is a mostly internal work for the analyst shaping a view of the transference-counter-transference occurrences that eventually coalesce to an emerging gestalt (an unconscious fantasy), which can be experienced by both analyst and patient.

With the help of the analyst’s interventions – often transference-interpretations of what transpires in the here and now of the session – a new understanding of the patient’s suffering will arise. Repeatedly applying these new insights to many similar situations, in which the same kind of conflicts arise, is the process of working through, which renders the patient increasingly capable of recognising the thought processes that stir their conflicts. Resolving these conflicts and putting them into perspective or at rest will free the patient’s mind from old inhibitions and make room for new choices.

This method is best applied when the patient is lying comfortably on a couch, saying whatever comes to mind, without being distracted by seeing the analyst, who is usually sitting behind the couch. We call this the classical setting. This allows both the patient and the analyst to fully listen to and reflect on what transpires in the session; the patient will feel immersed in their inner world, revive memories, revisit important experiences, talk about dreams and create fantasies, all of which help to shed new light on the patient’s life, history, and the workings of their mind.

Session Structure and Frequency

An analytic session usually lasts 45 or 50 minutes and should preferably take place on three, four or five days a week. A lower frequency of sessions per week or the use of the chair instead of the couch will sometimes be necessary. The timeframe for doing an analysis is hard to predict; an average of three to five years can be expected, even though any single case may take more or less time for completion.
All agreements about the setting (including the schedule, the fee per session and the cancellation policy) will be binding for both patient and analyst, and have to be renegotiated if change is required. Patient and analyst are nonetheless free at any time to decide to interrupt or end the analysis.

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