One: It’s a method of treatment that works by helping people understand how they create problematic patterns of thinking, feeling, acting, and relating.
Two: Such problems usually recreate patterns, problems and solutions from early intimate relationships. Like never forgetting how to ride a bike, we never forget how we were first loved. Those relationship procedures remain. But by putting words to those implicit relationship procedures people become able to make freer choices and have new experiences.
Three: The moment to moment relationship between therapist and patient is a [pick your metaphor] laboratory/playground/theater for experiencing and understanding those early relationship procedures. Living through those moments together in the treatment allows for an immediate, non-abstract awareness. It is a deep knowing, one with transformative power. In other words, psychoanalytic psychotherapy takes subjectivity seriously as an object of inquiry and a path to change. It starts simply with your unique experience of being you and creates conditions for a relationship to grow in which the multiple meanings of your experience are explored. And with the knowledge gained, a deep knowledge, comes freedom to make better choices.
