Psychodynamic psychotherapy is a form of talk therapy that relies on the free expression of your thoughts. As you put words to what’s on your mind, the therapeutic relationship becomes a vehicle for exploring how you relate to yourself and others. Expressing yourself honestly within it will let you work through difficult feelings, allowing you greater freedom to direct the course of your future and better enjoy your life.

What can therapy help with?

“Psychodynamic” is an umbrella term describing a family of psychotherapy styles that share a theoretical framework and have common characteristics. In practice, therapy can be set up in a number of different ways, each designed to address the needs and capabilities of different kinds of patients.

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is designed for people who may struggle in their relationships or have difficulties in their working life, but for a variety of reasons find it difficult to justify an extensive course of treatment. For support navigating difficult periods in life, simply sharing and working through emotional problems can be helpful enough to provide relief quickly. Beyond this, therapy provides a space to work through patterns of thinking, feeling, and relating, helping the patient gain new perspective on past and current issues. The therapist and the patient meet once or twice a week, following the patient’s train of thought in order to make their automatic ways of being explicit, and free up their ability to choose new directions in their life.

Psychodynamic-Oriented Supportive Therapy

‍ ‍Psychoanalytically informed supportive therapy is a treatment designed for people who have internalized ways of relating to themselves and others that cause chronic and intense disruptions to their day to day lives. Because these patterns are developed relatively early in the patient’s life, they can be strongly embedded in their sense of who they are and how they live in the world. Supportive therapy tries to offer these patients the scaffolding to compensate for unmet developmental needs, while at the same time dampening the more destabilizing aspects of intensive treatment. The therapist and patient meet face-to-face about twice weekly, and there may be parallel engagement with other kinds of treatment – e.g., reviewing behavioral methods for emotional regulation, somatic efforts at grounding to prevent dissociation, attending peer support groups for problematic substance use, or seeing a dietitian to help manage disordered eating. The relational focus of the therapy is designed to help build interpersonal fluency and the capacity to tolerate frustrating negative feelings that can arise in close contact with others.

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is the oldest and most intensive form of psychodynamic psychotherapy. The therapist and patient meet daily for most of the week, with the patient lying on a couch facing away from the therapist. In addition to providing a sense of continuity, the high session frequency and regressive setting work to heighten the development of the therapeutic relationship. Over the course of treatment, the patient’s verbal process leads to the conscious expression of thoughts, feelings, and ways of life that had previously been implicit and automatic. Emphasis is placed on minimizing the therapist’s impingement on the patient’s process, in order to intensify and make clearer the use of the relationship.

Psychoanalysis works best for people who manage to get along in their lives, but have critical difficulties feeling sturdy in the face of aggravations, or enjoying themselves as much as might be expected. Their suffering must be severe enough that they wish to invest substantial resources in a cure for their illness, but at the same time, their personal capacities must be strong enough to let them carry out an intense, demanding, and disturbing experience of transformational change.

Types of Psychotherapy