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Janice Lindsay-Hartz, Ph.D.
Licensed Clinical Psychologist
Retired in Florida

What Is Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy?

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy helps people become more aware of  how their minds 
work, so that they can make wise changes in their lives.  With the help of a 
psychotherapist, who provides support and empathy, people come to understand 
more clearly why they think, feel and act the way they do.  Through the process of 
psychotherapy, people gain insight into all sorts of habit patterns that affect the way 
they relate to others (from intimate others and family members to work colleagues), 
the way they react to situations, and their own internal thought and feeling patterns.  

With the help of a psychotherapist, people learn to become more aware of the 
stream of thoughts and feelings that affect how they relate to others, and how they 
feel internally.  In therapy, people can start to explore the more hidden reasons for 
the ways they think, and the ways they relate to others. Not only do people gain more 
self-understanding, but then they are freer to make changes in their lives.  

People learn more about how their past is continuing to influence  the present, even 
outside of their normal awareness. They learn to start connecting past to current 
difficulties.  Greater awareness of these past influences can lead to the freedom to 
act and think in new and wiser ways.  The increase in self-knowledge and emotional 
growth contributes to richer interpersonal relationships and a more effective use of 
talents and abilities.  Self-esteem usually increases.   Troubling symptoms which 
people experience (such as anxiety, depression, sabotaging one's own success, 
having affairs, repeated disappointments in personal relationships, choosing difficult 
partners, seeming lethargic, struggling with personal losses and transitions, feeling 
over-whelmed, over worrying) often provide clues to forces that are outside of 
normal awareness.  Exploring the full range of such symptoms, and learning more 
about even their hidden aspects, provides leverage to begin to make helpful changes 
in life.  Sometimes exploring dreams, and the stream of conscious thoughts which 
are always there in the background, helps people become more aware of how their 
mind and feelings work, and helps people make wise changes.  Previously puzzling 
symptoms and incidents become more understandable.  Over time, the troubling 
symptoms usually decrease or disappear; and more effective and healthy habit 
patterns are learned.

Sometimes, people come to therapy because they know they have struggled with 
underlying feelings of anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, or sexual or intimacy 
problems for most of their lives.  Even though they may function fairly well on the 
surface, they know they could feel better.   Through therapy people are able to gain a 
greater understanding of their issues, and to make changes to resolve them.   

Other times, people come to therapy when they stand at a crossroad in their lives, 
and are not sure what to do.  (For example, "Should I stay or leave – my job, my 
relationship, etc.?")  Although most people long to find a wise advisor who will simply 
tell them which path to take, therapy actually offers something a little different.  The 
therapist helps patients enhance their understanding of each path at the crossroads, 
including the sometimes hidden meanings.  Then patients become freer to use their 
own wisdom to choose which path to take, or to decide that a problem is not 
resolvable.

Link to an article summarizing the 
scientific evidence for the effectiveness of 
psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
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