BA ATPPP Member CAPT
Psychotherapist/Parent Education
Psychoanalytic Candidate - Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute

Psychoanalysis is a form of treatment offered 4 to 5 times per week. It searches for meanings of personal experiences that contribute to the factors that determine emotions and behaviour. The unconscious meaning may give form to unhappiness revealed in symptoms, troubling personality traits, recurrent difficulties in work or love relationships or disturbances in self esteem. Because these forces are unconscious, the advice or family or friends, self-help books or even the most determined efforts of will often fail to provide relief. The goal of psychoanalysis is to illuminate the meaning of what has remained unconscious to allow these underlying pressures to be examined.

Over time, as the analyst is able to make meaningful reflections on repetitive difficulties, allowing the patient the opportunity to reflect, refine, correct and modify these difficulties as the meaning becomes clearer.

Patients usually choose to lie on a couch so they can attend to their thinking/feeling processes more easily and set their own pace.

With this opportunity to explore and examine inner processes, over time, people's lives, behaviour, sense of self, and relationships often change in deep and abiding ways.

Psychoanalysis is a more intensive treatment than psychotherapy but is used to address similar psychological difficulties.

(Adapted from information at Toronto Psychoanalytic Society & Institute)