About psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis, founded by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), addresses psychological suffering through attentive listening to speech and the unconscious conflicts it reveals. By turning toward symptoms in order to understand them, it opens the possibility of lasting change.

Working with the unconscious mind

Psychoanalysis begins from a simple yet radical premise: that much of what shapes our thoughts, feelings, and actions lies outside conscious awareness. This unconscious dimension of mental life reveals itself in dreams, slips of the tongue, and, most importantly, symptoms—repetitive patterns of behaviour that persist despite our conscious intentions and cause us suffering.

In psychoanalysis, these phenomena are not treated as random or meaningless. They are understood as expressions of repressed thoughts and desires, fragments of experience that persist beyond awareness and seek a way to be heard.

Analytic work attends closely to these manifestations of the unconscious. What may appear irrational, confusing, or senseless is approached as meaningful, a disguised expression of conflict, compromise, or desire that has remained unacknowledged and seeks expression.

At the heart of psychoanalytic work is speech

“The work of psychoanalysis consists of letting the unconscious speak, in having the other story be heard.”

— Serge Leclaire

Over the course of analysis, the analyst and patient meet regularly to attend to the patient’s speech and to listen for how the unconscious reveals itself within it. The patient is invited to speak freely, saying whatever comes to mind, without censorship. The analyst listens with a particular attention oriented toward the formations of the unconscious, making it possible for something unexpected to be heard.

In the gaps, slips, and half-sayings of speech, previously repressed unconscious material finds expression. The patient begins to hear themselves differently, encountering hidden meanings and finding words for what was previously unsayable. It is through bringing this usually inaccessible unconscious material into speech and working it through that psychoanalysis has its transformative effect.

Symptoms: the repetitions that cause us suffering

Psychoanalysis considers a person as singular, with a history, language, and way of being uniquely their own. Symptoms such as anxiety, depression, phobias, addictions, and recurring relationship difficulties are understood as meaningful expressions of underlying unconscious conflicts.

Each symptom has its own logic, bearing traces of one’s experience and giving form to something that cannot be spoken directly. Rather than aiming for immediate relief or correction, psychoanalytic work turns toward the symptom to explore its associations. The underlying conflicts sustaining the symptom begin to be recognised and worked through. In time, the symptom loses the anguish bound up with it or finds another less distressing form of expression.

Why psychoanalysis rather than another form of therapy?

Psychoanalysis is especially suited to long-standing, recurring forms of psychic suffering. By addressing the underlying conflicts sustaining the symptom, the process seeks lasting change.

The process is sustained and intensive, requiring commitment from analyst and patient. This allows for a comprehensive understanding of one’s singular experience and unconscious sources of pain, which other forms of therapy may only touch upon. Over time, the work of analysis creates deeper shifts, offering not simply a reduction in symptom severity but a fundamental change in one’s relation to it.