When people and couples begin analysis, they bring many different experiences and ways of relating to themeselves, to others, and to the world. Psychoanalysis takes these experiences seriously, not as random events, but as possible openings onto questions that have yet to be recognized. You need not know exactly what is wrong or what you want from analysis. It is enough that something in your experience has become a question for you.
Individuals
People are often surprised to discover how much their lives have come to be organized by their lived experience—not only by loss or suffering, but by the ways they have learned to form understandable and nourishing relationships with the important others in their lives. We make sense of ourselves through language: through words and meanings inherited from our families, cultures, and relationships, as well as through the ways we have learned to speak to ourselves and understand what happens to us. Much of this becomes so familiar that we no longer recognize it as something we have learned, but experience it as the only possible way of understanding ourselves or the world.
In analysis, these patterns can gradually become more visible, including the ways we participate in them and forms of satisfaction that may be difficult to recognize, much less imagine speaking about. As familiar meanings begin to shift, other meanings and possibilities can come into view. What seemed fixed may become more open to question, making possible a different relationship to one’s desires, choices, and ways of inhabiting one’s life.
Couples
Couples often seek analysis hoping to resolve conflict or communicate more effectively. But intimate relationships also carry an often-unspoken hope of being completely understood, of finding in another the harmony and recognition that would make difference disappear or make one’s life feel complete. Couples are often surprised to discover that the very expectations and meanings that hold them together can also become rigid, making it difficult for either partner to move beyond familiar ways of relating. Analysis can make it possible to disentangle what each partner brings to the relationship from what has come to be expected or demanded of the other, without assuming that difference or even tension is problematic. As the demand for complete understanding or agreement begins to loosen, something more spontaneous and lively can emerge: new ways of enjoying one another, greater freedom to be different, and a relationship with more room for surprise and desire.
Creative Artists and Professionals
For artists and professionals, analysis can help illuminate what gets in the way of a more authentic relationship to one’s work. One may recognize the desire to find one’s own voice and yet discover unexpected barriers to doing so: the vulnerability of exposing something that feels genuinely one’s own, the difficulty of tolerating recognition, or the ways self-doubt and ambition become bound up with how one imagines being seen by others. What initially appears to be inhibition or dissatisfaction may have meanings that are not apparent on the surface. Analysis can make it possible to explore these meanings and to question what has come to organize one’s ambitions and sense of success. In doing so, one’s relationship to the work can become more open, more sustaining, and more deeply one’s own.