Psychotherapy & Counselling
About Psychotherapy & Counselling
Psychotherapy involves conversations with a listener who is trained to help you make sense of, and try to change, things that are troubling you.
​
Psychoanalytic based treatments are evidence-based forms of therapy which can effectively treat emotional problems and a wide range of mental health conditions such as depression, eating disorders and anxiety.
​
Psychoanalytic therapies involve talking to a trained therapist. This kind of therapy addresses underlying issues and causes, often from your past, which may be concerning you, or affecting your relationships with others. In your sessions you will be encouraged to talk freely and to look deeper into your problems and worries. It differs from many other talking therapies in that it aims to help people make deep seated change in personality and emotional development, alongside relieving troubling symptoms. It can help you discuss feelings you have about yourself and other people, particularly family and those close to you.
​
Some people seek help for specific reasons, such as eating disorders, psycho-somatic conditions, obsessional behaviour, or phobic anxieties. Some seek help for underlying feelings of depression or anxiety, difficulties in concentrating, dissatisfaction in work or in marriage, or for an inability to form satisfactory relationships. It may benefit anyone. It can help children and adolescents who have emotional and behavioural difficulties which are evident at home or school, like personality problems, depression, learning difficulties, school phobias, eating or sleeping disorders.
​
It is usual for sessions to be at a regular time every week and you may be in treatment for several months or years, depending on the scope and depth of your treatment. Psychoanalytic/psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis is conducted from one to five times per week and each session will probably last 50 minutes. Group or couple sessions are sometimes longer.
​
It would be overly simplistic to say that the difference between psychodynamic and psychoanalytic therapy is based on frequency of sessions. But frequency is a way of indicating the depth of work in relation to unconscious dynamics, transference and countertransference.
​
Whether psychoanalytic or psychodynamic psychotherapy is the treatment of choice for you depends on a variety of factors. It is often helpful to have one or more preliminary consultations with an experienced psychotherapist before deciding how best to proceed.
