What is psychoanalysis?

• Psychoanalysis is many things. It is elusive and incomplete by any definition, there being as many as there are instances of the practice. Psychoanalysis avoids the reductionism, labels and categorisations of the medical and psychological models of conceptualising a person’s style, struggles and symptoms.

• It is fundamentally a process of listening and speaking that aims to work at the level of those depths of the psyche beyond just what one thinks and feels, the “I” or the self.

• The task is to help a person take the story they have of their life and suffering so far, putting the pain of it to rest, and the remainder of that struggle to work; to harness what has gone before and build something new of themselves and their life.

• Psychoanalysis is a process that aims also at the creation and becoming of ones self - through speaking and listening in a particular fashion, transformations and creation can take place.