About Psychotherapy and Analysis
Psychoanalysis, Jungian Analysis and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy are all ‘psychodynamic’ treatment approaches. This means they place value on the importance of the unconscious life of the individual and ways in which this has an impact on our lives.
A psychodynamic way of working offers an open, exploratory space in which to discuss what is troubling you with the aim of discovering links with an unconscious cause. For example, a painful bereavement may bring to the surface past experiences of loss which, for whatever reason, were never fully mourned.
Or an adverse childhood experience becomes fixed in our personality, creating lifelong struggles in relationships, or in addictions, or in destructive life choices. Psychotherapy draws upon difficulties in current life, links to the past, and the relationship with the therapist as tools to explore these unconscious dynamics.
It isn’t a way of working that suits everyone. It often requires painful exploration with a commitment to emotional truth and a capacity for courageous reflections which are often challenging to our ‘defences’ - ways of adapting to life which we have developed as a way to protect ourselves from psychic pain, but which can then become limiting and problematic in themselves.
Psychotherapy sessions can be once or twice weekly, but analysis is conducted at a frequency of 3-5 times per week. This allows for an intensity of exploration which can be very helpful for people who wish to explore at a deeper level and for whom the frequency of sessions is beneficial and containing.
Jungian analysis/ psychotherapy:
is a form of psychoanalysis which has unique features and perhaps a slightly different emphasis to classical psychoanalysis. There is an emphasis on what Jung termed ‘individuation’ which is a lifelong process, driven by the Self, involving growth through developmental life stages, and also a creative relationship with the unconscious. Jung called his approach ‘constructive –synthetic’ as opposed to ‘reductive’ as he believed the Self exerts a pull towards greater individuation within the personality, which comes from his discovery of the ‘unrepressed unconscious’, a dynamic force within the psyche.
Put simply, Jungians view the unconscious as containing wisdom and creativity as well as darkness and destructiveness, and the unconscious is viewed not just as repressed contents from the ego, but as the unrepressed, the ‘not yet known’. Jung saw breakdown as an opportunity for greater integration within the personality – a ‘healing crisis’.
People come for psychotherapy or analysis for a variety of reasons: depression, anxiety, trauma, addictions, relationship difficulties, problems with anger, complex grief, unhealthy eating patterns, feelings of emptiness, meaninglessness, and despair. It can be a very effective treatment and a recent study (TADS Tavistock Adult Depression Study) showed that patients who receive psychodynamic treatment for depression continue to improve after therapy. This is thought to be because psychotherapy allows one to continue to develop insights, allowing for deeper change to continue to take place.
