What is psychotherapy?
Psychotherapy involves conversations with a listener who is trained to help you make sense of, and try to change, things that are troubling you.
What is psychotherapy?
Psychoanalytic based treatments are evidence-based forms of therapy which can effectively treat emotional problems and a wide range of mental health conditions such as depression, eating disorders and anxiety.
Psychoanalysis started with the discoveries of Sigmund Freud a century ago, but its methods have changed and developed a great deal since then. It has the most developed theoretical base of all the talking treatments and has had a significant influence on all talking treatments.
Psychoanalytic therapies involve talking to a trained therapist, usually one-to-one, but sometimes in a group or with a partner or family members. This kind of therapy addresses underlying issues and causes, often from your past, which may be concerning you, or affecting your relationships with others. In your sessions you will be encouraged to talk freely and to look deeper into your problems and worries. It differs from many other talking therapies in that it aims to help people make deep seated change in personality and emotional development, alongside relieving troubling symptoms. It can help you discuss feelings you have about yourself and other people, particularly family and those close to you.
Some people seek help for specific reasons, such as eating disorders, psycho-somatic conditions, obsessional behaviour, or phobic anxieties. Some seek help for underlying feelings of depression or anxiety, difficulties in concentrating, dissatisfaction in work or in marriage, or for an inability to form satisfactory relationships. It may benefit anyone. It can help children and adolescents who have emotional and behavioural difficulties which are evident at home or school, like personality problems, depression, learning difficulties, school phobias, eating or sleeping disorders.
It can contribute significantly to a person’s mental and physical health, to their sense of well-being and to their ability to live a more fulfilling life.
It is usual for sessions to be at a regular time every week and you may be in treatment for several months or years, depending on the scope and depth of your treatment. Psychoanalytic/psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis is conducted from one to five times per week and each session will probably last 50 minutes. Group or couple sessions are sometimes longer.
It would be overly simplistic to say that the difference between psychodynamic and psychoanalytic therapy is based on frequency of sessions. But frequency is a way of indicating the depth of work in relation to unconscious dynamics, transference and countertransference
Whether psychoanalytic or psychodynamic psychotherapy is the treatment of choice for you depends on a variety of factors. It is often helpful to have one or more preliminary consultations with an experienced psychotherapist before deciding how best to proceed.
Psychotherapy can also be practiced in an organisational setting. If you’re interested in learning more, see the frequently asked questions below.
Psychodynamic organisational therapy
Psychodynamic organisational therapy is an application of psychoanalytic thinking that focuses on the interaction between the unconscious dynamics of organisations and the unconscious dynamics of individuals. It differs from other applications practiced by psychoanalytic clinicians trained to work with individual patients within the consulting room, although it shares the same theoretical base.
Psychodynamic organisational therapists work in a variety of professional roles, within a wide spectrum of organisations that provide services for vulnerable client groups of all ages. They apply psychoanalytic thinking to their working context, to facilitate the creation and maintenance of a therapeutic environment. They do not offer individual psychotherapy, although they may offer formal and informal counselling within an organisational setting.
The culture of the workplace can be vulnerable to the anxieties and stresses of the individuals who work within it, to the pressures of the task required of them, to the emotional distress or dysfunction of the clients they serve, and to the many adverse external circumstances that may impinge upon it.
Individual role consultation with those in charge can help managers to deal with issues that are stirred up in their teams by exposure to traumatic events, emotional distress, disability and mental illness. Reflective group work can help staff make sense of experiences of relational difficulties and of secondary trauma that may reflect the problems and preoccupations of their clients; psychoanalytic process groups and therapeutic supervision can help to explore how the internal worlds of the many individuals who staff an organisation, and the internal worlds of their clients, may intersect and impact upon one another.
Through this work, facilitated by psychoanalytically trained organisational therapists over a sufficient period of time, managers and their staff teams can learn to build and maintain a therapeutic environment, providing a culture of empathy, collaboration and resilience and a more effective service.
You can find BPC registered psychodynamic organisational therapists on the BPC Register here and refining the specialism to psychodynamic organisational therapist.
Trainings in this modality are offered by APPCIOS (The Association for Psychodynamic Counselling and Practice in Organisational Therapy) You can find out more by going to one of the APPCIOS websites – https://appcios.info/ – or https://psychodynamicthinking.info/
Psychodynamic organisational therapists combine a psychoanalytic understanding of the individual within the organisation and of the organisation within the individual. They use this understanding to create and maintain therapeutic environments that impact on the wellbeing of both staff and client groups.
Organisational consultants may work in a variety of settings, including more commercial settings. They are not necessarily trained in psychoanalytic thinking or in how to apply psychoanalytic thinking to an organisation. Many psychodynamic organisational therapists also work as organisational consultants.
