Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis

Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis 


Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy generally means we will meet 1-to-3 times per week, seated face-to-face, for 45 minutes. During that clinical hour we explore your thoughts and feelings in a safe and non-judgmental format. One of the goals of psychotherapy is to be able to address problems and challenges that you face in the course of your life. 

My approach to psychotherapy is psychodynamic, meaning it is informed by an evidence-based psychoanalytic framework that attends to the root causes of symptoms and aspects of your character that may feel fated or unchangeable, but are in fact the result of developmental experiences both internal and external. Psychotherapy offers a means of change through understanding, and relief from anxieties, inhibitions, and painful affects such as anger, guilt, shame, and lack of self-regard.

Psychoanalysis
A psychoanalytic treatment involves 45-minute sessions at a frequency of 3 or 4 times per week. The patient lays on a couch and is asked to say whatever comes to mind as best they can without editing their thought processes as best they can. The analyst sits behind, slightly out of sight, and listens, intervening 
or offering interpretations when clinically appropriate.

What might seem at first an odd seating arrangement is designed to alleviate distractions from the analyst that could interrupt the patient’s free associations and allows for the emergence of feelings, thoughts, fantasies, and dreams. 

The practice of psychoanalysis was founded by Sigmund Freud between 1877 and 1939, though the “talking cure,” as it came to be known, was coined by Austrian-Jewish feminist Berta Pappenheim (Anna O. in Josef Breuer’s famous case study). Psychoanalysis as a theory of the mind and a therapeutic technique continues to be developed by practitioners worldwide. 

An analytic treatment is for those who seek to deepen their exploration of internal world—inner conflicts, thoughts, memories and fantasies that determine seemingly insoluble patterns and feelings in our lives—further than what psychotherapy has to offer. The goal of an analytic treatment involves a working-through of imponderable problems, and an understanding and resolution of conflicts in a safe and non-judgmental environment such that the patient can free themselves from repeating patterns and reactions and live more fully and freely their internal world. 

Psychoanalysis provides deep and long-lasting transformative change that offers relief from psychological suffering and allows for a more fulfilling relationship to love and work.
anth.graves@gmail.com
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New York, NY 10028
+1 (718) 490–2626