Basic Concept
The term "mental health" should be reserved for the practice of psychology and medicine. Psychoanalysis is psychoanalysis: a specific way of listening to people where the analyst's distinctive listening, interventions, and interpretations promote unparalleled mental expansion in the analyzed individuals, leading to the possibility of resolving emotional disorders that hinder well-being; this essentially occurs through the relief felt when understanding and re-signifying painful experiences that have shaped who we are.
A Theory of Mind
Human Conversation – Embracing Complexity and Understanding Beneath the Surface
Psychoanalysis emerged from the appreciation of the power of people speaking directly to one another about important and difficult-to-understand matters. As human beings are built for communication, our goal is to understand and be understood. Whether reading the news, engaging on social media, or talking in everyday life, many of us try to make sense of what drives people's behavior. And many of us are asking why people act against their own best interests.
Historical, political, and economic explanations offer important insights into the irrationality of everyday life. Psychoanalysis, however, provides a different perspective.
By examining what lies beneath the surface of human behavior, psychoanalysis teaches us about the unconscious psychological forces within us—beyond everyday awareness.
Psychoanalysis, by offering multifaceted and multidimensional explanations, seeks to understand the complexity of the mind.
How does psychoanalytic treatment work?
Psychoanalytic treatment is based on the idea that people are often motivated by desires that are not consciously recognized and that originate in the unconscious. These can be identified through the relationship between the patient and the analyst. By listening to patients’ stories, fantasies, and dreams, and by observing how they relate to others, psychoanalysts offer a unique perspective—one that friends and family members may not be able to see.
The analyst also listens to the ways in which these patterns appear between the analysand and the analyst.
What lies outside the analysand’s awareness is called transference, and what lies outside the analyst’s awareness is called countertransference.
Talking with a trained psychoanalyst helps identify underlying patterns of problematic behavior. By analyzing transference and countertransference, the analyst and analysand can discover paths toward emotional well-being and freedom—through substantial and lasting changes that come from working through traumas and fixations rooted in childhood.
Psychoanalysis typically involves several sessions per week, during which the analysand communicates as openly and freely as possible. A higher frequency of weekly sessions tends to deepen and intensify the treatment, but this is something that is worked out between the analysand and the analyst.
The use of the couch in psychoanalysis is essential for the psychoanalyst’s work of listening and interpretation.
Through refined technique, the analyst perceives and interprets the internalized and repressed representations within the person’s unconscious.
It is the awareness of these unconscious facts that brings relief or makes symptoms disappear.
About analysis
Sometimes analysis is also referred to as psychotherapy, which uses the psychoanalytic method of treatment, although the pair may meet less frequently—sometimes only once a week.
Even though psychotherapy closely resembles analysis in its use of free association, the importance placed on the unconscious and the centrality of the relationship between analysand and analyst may be diminished.
On Didactic Psychoanalysis
Didactic analysis refers to the practice of applying psychoanalytic theories and methods to explain certain behaviors.
It involves seeking meaning and motivation outside the analytic setting, using psychoanalytic principles to better understand individual and group behavior.
Didactic psychoanalysts are known to work as consultants in community contexts such as schools, businesses, and corporations.
In many cases, combining didactic analysis with therapeutic analysis can lead to effective and meaningful results.
What Others Are Saying About Neuropsychoanalysis
The connection between neuroscience and psychoanalysis dates back to Sigmund Freud, who was both a neuroscientist and a neurologist. Freud’s interest in the functioning of the brain and the mind led to the development of psychoanalytic theory.
Major advances in neuroscience since Freud’s time have deepened our understanding of how the mind works, leading neuroscientists to explore topics often considered psychoanalytic in nature—such as memory, repression, and dreams.
Neuropsychoanalysis creates a mutually enriching dialogue between the two fields.
🧠 “I had to choose between being a neurologist or being a psychologist. I chose to become a psychologist in order to remain a neurologist.”
— Sigmund Freud