Psychoanalysis: frequently asked questions

Psychoanalysis is a way of exploring the parts of our lives that we don’t always fully understand. It takes place through speaking with a psychoanalyst, usually at the same time each week, sometimes more than once a week. You are invited to speak as freely as you can, including about things that may seem unimportant, contradictory, difficult to say, or hard to make sense of.

The analyst listens closely, without judgement, to what you say and to the patterns that emerge in your speech. In the course of this work, you may begin to notice things about yourself: about your desires, relationships, difficulties, or the ways you find yourself repeating things in your life.

Psychoanalysis began with Sigmund Freud in Vienna in the 1890s and has changed considerably since then. What remains at its heart is the idea that speaking and being listened to in this particular way can open up a different kind of understanding: not someone telling you what to do or how you should be, but a space in which you can discover more about what makes you who you are and what you want.

Psychoanalysis is not concerned with helping people become more normalised, or with teaching them how they are supposed to be. Instead, it is concerned with the singularity of each person: the particular ways in which we think, feel, desire, relate to others, and experience our lives.

In the presence of a non-judgemental listener, you can speak about things that may feel difficult, contradictory, or not yet fully understood. As you speak, you may begin to notice patterns, conflicts, desires, and ways of relating to yourself and to others that were previously difficult to see.

The aim is not to provide you with answers or tell you who you should be. It is to create a space in which you can listen differently to what you say, and discover something about yourself that may not have been known before. From this process of self-discovery, new possibilities for understanding and living can emerge.

From the outside, very little. You talk and I listen. There are no worksheets, no exercises and no homework.

You say whatever comes into your head, even when it seems random, boring or embarrassing. This is called free association. It sounds easy and it is not. Most people find it strange at first. If speaking is difficult, I would also invite you to write or make art instead.

A symptom is anything you would like to stop doing and cannot. It might be a habit, a fear that restricts you, or a pattern that keeps repeating in your relationships.

Psychoanalysis does not treat a symptom as a fault to be corrected. It treats it as something worth listening to. A symptom is usually communicating something that has not yet been put into words.

Shorter therapies work on a stated problem, over a set number of sessions, using a structured plan. They help a great many people. Psychoanalysis is doing something different.

There is no fixed number of sessions, no set of exercises and no advice. The aim is not to manage the problem but to find out what it is about. This is why it takes longer and why it goes into more than the problem you arrived with. I do not give you advice or generic solutions, but help you arrive at your own way of dealing with the challenges you might be facing.

Most people come once or twice a week. Some people come for several months around a particular difficulty; others continue for longer.

Anyone who is curious about their own mind. You do not need a diagnosis and you do not need anything to have gone badly wrong. Many people arrive with nothing they can point to, only a feeling that something is not quite working out in their life.

The first consultation is free and takes place online. It is a conversation about what has brought you here, and there is no expectation that you continue past it.