Psychoanalytic Approach

Psychoanalytic therapy focuses on exploring unconscious or deeply buried thoughts and feelings. Examining repressed experiences and emotions, often from childhood, can shed light on how some of these may affect the clients current thinking and behaviours.

Based on the work of psychologists, such as Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, and Carl Jung, psychoanalytic therapy allows clients to deal with their present-day conflicts by bringing the roots of these conflicts into consciousness. Freud compared the psyche to an iceberg, where most of our thoughts are rooted below the surface of our consciousness.

The unconscious psyche contains our most primal urges and instincts, which are often regulated by societal norms and expectations. Some techniques that are commonly used within this approach are dream analysis, examining word associations, and examining attachment styles.