Psychoanalysis is the most intense and ambitious kind of treatment I offer. And it’s aimed at effecting the deepest level of change. It’s designed especially for helping you uncover aspects of yourself that operate outside your awareness. Its main goal is helping you understand and modify aspects of your personality.
People who benefit most from psychoanalysis often struggle with rigidity and control, difficulties being vulnerable, chronic guilt, perfectionism, fragile self-esteem, feelings of inadequacy, and conflicts in their overall sense of identity. These are the kind of personality issues that make psychoanalysis the most effective choice for treatment.
Changing longstanding personality traits, chronic anxieties, and hidden insecurities that have now become part of your identity is an achievable but ambitious task. Psychoanalysis requires a significant commitment for both the therapist and client. Treatment consists of 3-4 sessions per week and lasts for 2-3 years or longer. Increased frequency leads to increased intensity, and it’s this increased intensity that allows for the deepest kind of change. Similar to the way adding heat allows metal to become more malleable and take on a different form, the increased frequency of therapy adds the emotional “heat” necessary to achieve profound changes in our personality.
Not only does psychoanalysis have a long tradition as one of the most effective types of treatments for enriching life and altering how we experience the world, it’s frequently the treatment of choice of therapists themselves looking to deepen their understanding of their own unconscious processes. The “original psychedelic experience,” psychoanalysis has been sought as an aid for expanding consciousness, altering how we relate to ourselves and others, and as a tool for resolving blocks in creativity. It’s long been the treatment sought by creatives, intellectuals, and industry leaders for years.
While many types of therapy offer short-term benefit, psychoanalysis is unique in that it offers the possibility of change that endures far beyond the end of treatment. It can help you alter underlying aspects of your personality in ways that can last a lifetime. This is due to the fact psychoanalysis effects change at the very structure of your personality.
Rather than challenging negative self-talk, teaching better coping strategies, or coaching clients to feel more empowered, psychoanalysis helps reshape the very lenses we use to view the world. Changes at this level impact every aspect of our experience in the world. Psychoanalysis ultimately liberates us to live lives we choose rather than lives we’re fated to live out.