The Psychoanalytic Approach

Psychoanalysis is a form of psychotherapy which tries to help the person develop insight into the causes of their problems and symptoms. By helping the person gain insight into the causes of their difficulties, psychoanalysis creates new conscious choices that the person is free to make. Psychoanalysis utilizes several methods and techniques to accomplish these goals.The most important technique is Free Association. In Free Association the patient is instructed to say whatever comes to their mind while they are in session, without editing anything and without censoring anything. A second technique that psychoanalysis utilizes is Dream Interpretation which is an elaborate systematic study of the person’s associations to each element in the dream. It is critical also to identify what the Day Residue was. The Day Residue is something that happened in the real life of the person, usually the day preceding the night’s dream, which serves as a trigger and gives context for the major interpretations of the dream.

The patient’s relationship to the Analyst and to the therapy itself are the most important methods of Psychoanalysis. The Co-Transference Relationship describes how the patient and analyst relate to one another in terms of Unconscious representations of past significant relationships and situations. The Co-Resistance Relationship describes of both patient and analyst suffer from unconscious attempts to defeat/sabotage the very goals that each one very much and very consciously are trying to accomplish.

Another important method in Psychoanalysis is the Working Through Process. In Working Through the patient brings back to his/her next session how they tried to apply their newly gained insight, which is usually a trial and error process. The analyst and patient then try to develop new insights and examine how to more successfully apply the new insights.

Unconscious processes and early childhood experience are regarded as very important in forming the personality and influencing the development of the person into adulthood. The family system is important to understand as well as all significant others, such as special teachers, friends, etc. from childhood.

Psychoanalysis usually requires multiple sessions per week over a period of several years. No one can know or predict exactly how long the psychoanalytic process will take. Our philosophy at PIP-MHC is to be Open-ended, which means the process will take as long as it needs to take without assigning an artificial time limit on it.