While both psychoanalysis and psychotherapy aim to help people understand and change patterns that cause distress, they differ significantly in their approach, depth, and goals. Traditional psychotherapy often focuses on symptom relief, problem-solving, and developing coping strategies for specific issues. It typically involves structured sessions where the therapist takes a more active, directive role in guiding the conversation toward particular therapeutic goals.
Psychoanalysis, by contrast, is less concerned with immediate symptom management and more interested in understanding the unconscious forces that shape your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Rather than focusing primarily on conscious problems, psychoanalytic work explores the underlying patterns that create and maintain difficulties—patterns that often operate outside our awareness. This process tends to unfold more slowly and requires a willingness to invest in exploring unexpected connections, contradictions, and meanings that emerge through free association and the therapeutic relationship itself.
The Lacanian Approach
Rather than viewing the unconscious as a simply repository of hidden artifacts, Lacanian analysis recognizes the unconscious has a structure full of patterns, repetitions, and meanings that shape our experience in ways we don’t fully grasp. Interpretation isn’t used in the traditional sense, but rather insight is gained by paying close attention to what you convey in your speech, dreams, and fantasies. Ultimately patterns and possibilities that weren’t previously available to conscious awareness come to the fore and can be worked with. The analyst’s role is more about maintaining a particular kind of listening allowing such unconscious material to emerge and be recognized. This approach often leads to profound shifts in how you understand yourself and relate to others, and facilitates change both lasting and transformative because the fundamental structures organizing your experience have been altered.
Couples
For couples, a psychoanalytic approach offers unique insights into how partners unconsciously position themselves in relation to each other. Rather than focusing primarily on communication skills or conflict resolution techniques, this work explores the deeper patterns of desire, fantasy, and meaning that each person brings to the relationship. We examine how each partner’s unconscious assumptions about love, intimacy, and partnership create repetitive cycles—often the very cycles that brought you to therapy. By understanding these underlying structures, couples can begin to relate to each other in new ways, moving beyond the automatic responses that keep them stuck in familiar but unsatisfying patterns.
Short-term Consultations
While psychoanalysis is often associated with long-term work, a Lacanian perspective can also be valuable in brief consultations. Sometimes a few sessions focused on listening carefully to how you talk about a particular problem can reveal crucial insights that shift your entire relationship to that issue. These consultations might help you recognize patterns you hadn’t noticed, question assumptions that seemed unshakeable, or discover new ways of thinking about a situation that feels stuck. The goal isn’t to solve problems quickly, but rather to open up possibilities for understanding that you can continue to explore on your own.