What Is Psychodynamic Therapy?
Some people choose their therapist on instinct, but others want to know a lot of information about what they’re signing up for. For the latter, I’ve shared my own understanding of the important aspects of psychodynamic therapy, and what I hope to offer each patient who comes to see me. I hope this will provide you with what you need to make the right decision about whether this kind of support might be a good fit for you.
Acknowledgement of the Unconscious Mind
Psychodynamic therapy has its foundation in the idea that we are often impacted by patterns and forces within ourselves that we are not consciously aware of. Even people who are particularly clever or self-aware are still imprinted with beliefs and ways of manoeuvring through the world that are so deeply and implicitly embedded that they remain entirely unconscious to the person. These aspects of each individual’s ways of being find their source in different places - intergenerational trauma, the collective of humanity itself, what is expected of us men or as women, our experiences within our physical bodies, and in the stories of our early lives and important relationships. Psychodynamic therapy aims to facilitate the illumination of these unconscious aspects of the patient.
Beyond Cognition
We live now in a cultural paradigm that is severely polarised in favour of reason and cognition as means of determining what is true, and what is the right path forward. Even in the psychotherapeutic space, cognitive therapy is widely considered the ‘gold standard’ or most ‘evidence-based’ treatment for a variety of problems. Cognitive therapy is based on a theory which broadly suggests that replacing maladaptive thinking patterns with more positive-oriented thinking can resolve symptoms. This paradigm does not acknowledge the role of the unconscious in our experiences. It can also neglect the value of the intuitive mind, our emotions, our felt sense of what is happening in our bodies, and the roles these aspects play in our lives in their own right, as separate from our thoughts.
Psychodynamic therapy works on the basis that, for a person to heal, they need to be supported to discover an alternate way of being that is not only rationally thought through, but fully realised and wired into their physical body, so that it exists in an organic, spontaneous way. In the mind of the psychoanalytic therapist, a person who is left to police their thinking patterns forever is not healed.
Integrating Logic and Intuition
This is not to say that our rational, logical minds should be ignored or dismissed. Rather, through the process of therapy, the mind is returned to its rightful place within the patient. In largely forgotten history, the rational mind was considered the important, faithful servant of one’s intuition...
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