About Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

Psychological treatment can be symptom-focussed and provide people with strategies for dealing with difficult feelings or situations. This form of treatment is generally short-term. Alternatively, psychotherapy may involve a more introspective approach, where the goal is to provide an understanding of self, through uncovering the underlying basis for feelings, behaviours, choices and actions. This form of treatment is longer term and is sometimes termed psychodynamic psychotherapy. My practice is based upon psychodynamic principles.

Psychodynamic psychotherapy is based on a theory known as psychoanalysis. The essential ideas were originally based upon the contribution of the early analysts such as Freud and Jung, and more recent theorists such as Bion and Ferro. These theorists stress the importance of gaining a better understanding of one’s own subjective experience.

​The theory has been undergoing change ever since the early work of the original psychoanalysts, with current psychodynamic theory drawing upon a range of ideas, but continuing to privilege self-understanding, recognition that not all memories are conscious, and that gaining self-awareness in the context of interpersonal relationships, is healing over time.

Practical Information

• ​Psychotherapy might involve more than one appointment a week, but this is optional and based on the specific needs of the individual.
• Sessions are generally held at the same time each week and last fifty minutes. 
• The decision to go ahead is based on an initial, mutual assessment session, lasting fifty minutes. In some instances, the assessment period may be extended.
• This gives me a chance to see if I believe I am an appropriate person to help you and gives you an opportunity to determine whether I am someone you feel comfortable enough to work with.
• You may be asked to complete an online survey to assist with my assessment.

How it works

​Patients attend therapy sessions, lasting 50 minutes, once or twice a week, over a period of time. Therapy may be short term which ranges from 16 to 20 weeks, or longer term, which may be over several years. During treatment, we work towards building an effective therapeutic relationship, drawing upon a mutual understanding of the therapy process. We may use the therapy relationship to examine and explore repetitive interpersonal patterns, as well as unconscious feelings, emotions and symbolic material such as dreams, to gain a better understanding of your symptoms, or the problems which may be contributing to the difficulties which led you to seek help.
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Psychodynamic theory considers that there may be a range of factors contributing to a person’s experiencing difficulties. These may include genetic and constitutional factors, but we also recognise the significance of early experience, relationships with parents, family members, sexuality, powerful emotions, trauma, deprivations, and the experience of loss. These experiences may well contribute to patterns laid down early in the person’s developing mind, and provide unconscious templates, or models of relationship. These unconscious patterns may contribute to the reasons for seeking help. 

Your relationship with the therapist will hopefully provide a very different experience to previous relationships. Through this relationship, you are expected to gain a greater understanding of yourself and develop a greater capacity to express such experiences during the process of the therapy, and outside the therapy.

Having regular meetings over an extended period, in a therapeutic relationship where you feel able to express a range of experiences (including the feelings associated with such experiences), allows unconscious elements to emerge and supports you to gain new understandings of yourself and your experiences. Through this process, you will become aware of the role of unconscious influences over time, as we start to examine your experience occurring within the therapy process itself. 

With such awareness, you should be in a better position to make conscious changes in your relationships with important others in your life.

The work may be painstaking for us both, and requires some degree of perseverance. When successful, however, the rewards are significant: you will become more able to engage in, or change previous patterns which were impacting your capacity to live more fully. You may experience a change in your sense of yourself, and in relation to significant others, your relationships within work contexts, and also your capacity for creativity. Success depends upon both the therapist and patient, and their ability to work together over time, for the process to lead to desired outcomes.