About psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis, founded by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), addresses psychological suffering through attentive listening to speech and the unconscious conflicts it reveals.

Working with the unconscious mind

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

None of these phenomena are treated as random or meaningless. What may appear irrational, confusing, or senseless is approached as a disguised expression of desire, conflict, or compromise: something that has remained unacknowledged and is seeking a way to be heard.

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 an analysis, analyst and patient meet regularly. The patient is invited to speak freely, saying whatever comes to mind without censoring it. The analyst listens with a particular kind of attention, oriented toward the unconscious, so that something unexpected can be heard.

In the gaps, slips, and half-sayings of speech, what has been repressed finds a way through. The patient begins to hear themselves differently, noticing meanings they had not recognised and finding words for what previously could not be said. Bringing this material into speech and working it through is how psychoanalysis has its transformative effect.

Symptoms: the repetitions that cause us suffering

Psychoanalysis considers each 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 memories, words, and experiences it is linked to. Over time, the conflicts sustaining it begin to be recognised and worked through. The symptom loses the anguish bound up with it, or finds another, less distressing form of expression.

Is psychoanalysis right for me?

Psychoanalysis is especially suited to long-standing difficulties: suffering that has returned in different forms over the years, or that has not shifted despite earlier efforts to address it. By working with the conflicts that sustain a symptom, not only the symptom itself, it aims at change that lasts.

The work asks for commitment from both analyst and patient, and it unfolds over time. That time is what allows a person's singular history and the sources of their suffering to be understood in depth. What analysis offers is not simply a reduction in symptoms, but a fundamental change in one's relation to them.