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What is Psychoanalysis?

Adult Psychoanalysis
Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis

Adult Psychoanalysis  

Psychoanalysis is based on the observation that individuals are often unaware of many of the factors that determine their emotions and their behavior.

Unconscious conflicts can create disharmony, unhappiness, and inhibitions that may be expressed through diffiuculties that affect us in work or relationships or create disturbances in our mood and self-esteem.  Psychoanalytic treatment reveals how these unconscious forces are affecting current behavior.

Because these forces are unconscious, the advice of friends and family, the reading of self-help books, or even an individual's most determined efforts will often fail to provide relief.  In analytic treatment, we get hints about these unconscious thoughts and expectations by carefully examining the choices we make, our patterns of behavior, our dreams, our memories of the past, and our spontaneous thoughts.

Many of these unconscious thoughts and expectations can be traced to our childhoods.  Although we may have found the best solutions to our challenges when we were young, those same solutions may hinder our development and successful adaptation as adults unless we can understand them as fully as possible.

Psychoanalysis provides this opportunity by establishing an intimate working partnership between the analyst and the individual.  During the work, the patient becomes aware of the underlying sources of his or her difficulties, not simply intellectually, but emotionally, by re-experiencing them with his or her analyst, in the safety of the analytic setting.  This natural process, called transference, enables us to modify crippling life patterns, remove incapacitating symptoms, expand the freedom to work productively, to love freely and unhindered, and to change in deep and abiding ways.

 

From American Psychoanalytic Association
about psychoanalysis
Copyright 2004

 

Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis

Child and adolescent psychoanalysis, both offshoots of adult psychoanalysis, share with it a common theoretical framework for understanding psychological life.

• Child and adolescent psychoanalysts approach each situation individually.
• They help parents take care of their children’s difficulties.
• They respect each child and adolescent as a unique individual within a family and a community.
• They understand that factors outside a person’s awareness influence feelings, thoughts, and actions.

They respect each child and adolescent as a unique individual within a family and a community.

They understand that factors outside a person’s awareness influence feelings, thoughts, and actions.

They help parents, children and adolescents understand how the past shapes the present, and can influence the future.

They help children and adolescents remove obstacles to the development of their skills and competencies so they can become happier, more caring, productive and creative.

The goal of child and adolescent analysis is the modifications of psychological roadblocks so children and adolescents can achieve their full potential.  The goal for the child is to restore him or her to healthy and progressive development and their optimal level of functioning.  The goal for the parents is to facilitate their understanding of and communication with their child which will help them in the present as well as the future.

   

From American Psychoanalytic Association
From about psychoanalysis
Copyright 2004