Psychoanalysis is a highly individualized form of therapy that helps you to know yourself well from the inside out.

It helps you determine how your mind and your experiences affect your emotions and behavior.

Through psychoanalysis you can get to the root of what is troubling you and you can increase your ability to get the most out of your life.

Psychoanalysis is a deeper exploration of yourself than counseling and psychotherapy.

Psychoanalysis explained

Psychoanalysis has had a long evolution. In the beginning, it was strictly Freudian with a person lying on a couch and free associating while the analyst sat silently out of sight. Today, psychoanalysis is much more of a partnership between two people. The process can be quite interactive, with the analyst and the person seeking help talking and thinking together.

In psychoanalysis, there is a deep commitment to self-exploration, and this usually requires more than one session a week. Of utmost importance to the analytic process is the analyst’s respect for an individual’s uniqueness, desire for self-awareness, and quest for self-determination.

Despite all the changes in psychoanalysis since Freud, it still can be said that psychoanalysis has mostly to do with making the unconscious conscious. In modern terms, this means learning to look more closely at yourself to see what has shaped your character, your personality, and your ways of relating to others. You focus on what is going on with you psychologically. You experience yourself more fully. You look at how you handle relationships. All of this leads to you having freer choices in how you live and it answers the question, “What can I do to change myself?” For example, if you are a person who tends to be guarded and you feel this has not been good for you, you can look into your guardedness, get to know more about it, see how it got there, see why it is still there, and see what you can do about it. The psychoanalytic relationship — the thinking and talking and relating that you and the psychoanalyst do together — is the key to this kind of self-development.

Professional Training

After earning a doctorate in psychology and completing at least one year of postdoctoral supervision, a psychologist attends a four-year psychoanalytic training institute. The psychoanalytic training includes coursework in theory, research, and technique, as well as supervised casework and the psychologist’s own psychoanalysis.



For more information or if you are interested in psychoanalysis for yourself, please contact Dr. Kenneth Schwarz at Dutchess Psychology Practice, LLC.