The psychoanalytic approach provides a place from which to speak about what really matters to you. I offer a confidential space, where you can speak freely without judgement.
This may not come easily – you may not, at first, be able to really articulate what is niggling at or troubling you. Perhaps this is the very issue: you cannot easily say what it is that you want in life. Or perhaps it’s a question of inhibition: you cannot act in line with what you want. Perhaps feelings of confusion, regret or hopelessness are present for you. This would be an opportunity to start to put words to what might initially feel ungraspable.
Alternatively, you might be in crisis – something very specific, shocking or sudden may have happened to you, perhaps in the realm of love, or of work. Perhaps you have lost someone, perhaps you have endured a traumatic encounter.
From another perspective, the psychoanalytic approach is typically open-ended and exploratory – a work of curiosity. You may, for example, have questions about your sexuality or identity that you wish to explore.
In psychoanalytic practice there are no ready-made solutions; it is, rather, an approach to listening, an enquiry and a questioning, that takes seriously your singularity – your history, your way of being in the world, your unconscious.
Broadly speaking, psychoanalysis works with the basic premise that there may be unconscious motivations linked to earlier formative experiences that are driving your current difficulties – symptoms, questions, patterns of behaviour.
The psychoanalytic approach addresses the deeper structures behind the distress you may be feeling or the questions you may be carrying. A treatment of this kind invites the possibility of seeing and experiencing things anew, providing a passage to real and lasting change.