What is psychodynamic psychotherapy?
Psychodynamic psychotherapy is a talking therapy that helps you understand how past experiences, and feelings outside your awareness, shape the way you think, feel and relate to others now.
“Psychodynamic” and “psychoanalytic” are often used side by side, and it’s understandable to be unsure what separates them. Both come from the same tradition. Both rest on the idea that much of what shapes us – how we love, what we fear, the choices we keep making – happens outside our immediate awareness, and that it can be understood.
Psychodynamic vs psychoanalytic: what is the difference?
Broadly, psychodynamic psychotherapy is a wider term for therapies that draw on psychoanalytic ideas; it can be shorter-term or focused on a particular difficulty. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy tends to be more open-ended and sometimes more intensive, occasionally meeting more than once a week. That gives patterns room to emerge in their own time, including in the relationship with the therapist. In practice the line between the two is not sharp. What matters most is finding a way of working that suits you.
How psychodynamic therapy works
I am an adult psychoanalytic psychotherapist. I trained at the Tavistock Clinic around twenty years ago, worked in NHS mental health teams in Chelsea and Westminster, and went on to complete adult psychoanalytic psychotherapy training at the British Psychotherapy Foundation, of which I am a member. I am registered with the British Psychoanalytic Council and see adults in private practice in West London. Sessions are a place to speak as freely as you can about whatever is on your mind. I listen closely for patterns – in what you bring, in your relationships, and in how things unfold between us – and share my thoughts as we go. It is a collaborative process, and not always a comfortable one; it asks for curiosity, and it gives time.
What issues can psychodynamic therapy help with?
This way of working often suits people who feel that something keeps repeating – in relationships, at work, or in their mood – and want to understand why, rather than look only for a quick fix. People come with low mood, anxiety, difficulties with self-esteem or identity, relationships that feel stuck, or after a loss or a big change in their lives. Some arrive with a clear sense of the problem; others simply know that something isn’t right.
If you’d like a conversation first, please book your time.