Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

Psychodynamic psychotherapy is insight-oriented work.  It goes deep.  We look at individuals' deep unconscious motivations, fantasies, drives, and desires that may lead to their behaviors and actions. Bungled actions. Slips of the tongue. Malapropisms.  We ask them to bring in their dreams. We ask them to sit beside us as we let their unconscious slowly ravel and unfold in the space between us.  We provide a safe, non-judgmental, loving, holding environment for each individual to express his or her darkest, and perhaps, most hopeful, desires and fears.  We are the container. We attempt to contain, and to lovingly hold.  We do not consider ourselves the experts, but rather, we work in tandem with our patients to figure out what lies beneath.

There are many schools of psychodynamic and analytic thought.  One school is called Lacanian analysis.  In Lacanian thought, the unconscious is less something inside of a person, and more of an intersubjective "space between" people.  The unconscious is then structured through language, and comes out in various "signifiers" that a patient may express via language, as he or she goes on throughout treatment. Our job as the analyst is to always hold a "desire to know." The analyst has a "wanting to know," rather than a complete and utter knowing.  As an analyst, we ask a question to the unconscious of the analysand, and we wait for a response from the unconscious.

So you may be asking... what relevance does this have to my daily life?  Why all of this psychobabble?

The "I" is always in the field of the "Other."  In other words, an infant sees its' face in the mirror.  Lacan would assert that the image the infant sees in the mirror does not correspond to the actual physical reality the infant experiences.  Throughout the life of the infant, therefore, its' ego sustains its sense of self and singularity through an ongoing misrecognition of the actual conditions of its' existence - that in fact, IT DEPENDS ON OTHERS.   An infant must depend, therefore, to become independent. The I is always in the field of the other.  More to come on this later.....