Psychoanalytically-informed psychotherapy

taylor@taylorburchpsychotherapy.com

(415) 413-7120

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Assumptions—

A place like this, a therapist’s website, is perhaps an opportune place for assumptions, from and about both of us. Of course, there’s mystery here—about what I’m like as a practitioner, how I think about therapy, what you and I might be like in conversation, if we might like each other—and maybe that’s part of the potential to assume. If so, fair. Another of these assumptions, and another fair one, might be that you are struggling somehow, are in some kind of pain or confusion, maybe you are or wonder if you are mentally ill, and you assume that I can give you advice for how to cope with it, a diagnosis, or can at least help you figure out something about it. Reasonable, right? Psychotherapy does often go something like this. Another set of assumptions, and maybe these make up much of the reason for your search for a therapist, are assumptions that you’re coming with that you’d like to address or test; about yourself, or your life, or your relationships, or any of these and their further possibilities.

Psychoanalysis and the unpredictable “cure”, or end—

I practice therapy from a psychoanalytic perspective, the reason being because, simply and passionately, I love it. It is my favorite branch of therapeutic intention, one reason being, its honesty about the unpredictability of this thing you might be looking for called “cure”, or what is more popularly, in our time referred to as, “healing”. Psychoanalysis is a field full of lovers of this subject: practitioners and readers and patients and a mix of all of the aforementioned, and yet, there is no consensus on what “cure” looks like. Because each therapeutic process is particular to each person maybe there can’t be. Naming at the beginning that what happens through and after this process is unpredictable is an admitting to the fact that while there might be something universal about all of us as humans, you are somehow different from everyone else here and the reasons that drive you to pursue therapy are relevant to how you are different. Your particularities are also what will be part of your treatment and what inevitably comes from it.

Admitting to the unpredictable is admitting that neither of us knows what you and your life might look and feel like after we’ve talked about it enough. Maybe we find out you didn’t need a cure or healing at all. Maybe we find that instead you actually wanted something! Whatever the case, this humility about endings gives us room in our conversations to listen to you without imposing a censorship or an ideal. It lets the process of our conversations open up to you and take us where it may.

Talking—

People often go into therapy looking for one thing and finding out later that what they were after turned out to be something they didn’t have language for when they first began. The process of talking and conversing with someone who is listening and responding from the therapist’s chair is an important part of what helps them find it, speak it. I think of therapy, especially of the psychoanalytic vein, to be a place for first words—words that lead somewhere intimate and personal and often unimagined. And interestingly, these words lead to other words: lovely words, curse words, curative words, forbidden words, unwanted words, kind words, words that have a tendency to remind us of things we didn’t know were real, or forgotten, or lived, or loved. Maybe it’s a process of finding language for oneself; A place of untangling knots and seeing what happens from there.

The unconscious—

To be in a therapy that is informed by psychoanalytic theory is to be in a process interested in and listening for what about you is automatic and active, yet not from the place you call “I”. Psychoanalytic theory considers that though the specifics of our unconscious don’t necessarily occur to us at the conscious level, they are participatory and radically influential nonetheless. Psychoanalytic theory considers that the unconscious fundamentally structures the troubles and sufferings that bring us to therapy to begin with; the symptoms and difficulties one carries into the analytic process are living documentations and formations of it. It considers too then, that the materials of the unconscious must be worked with in order to come upon that unpredictable place, or maybe state, of “cure”. The stuff of dreams, daydreams, fantasies, repetitions of certain words or choices (like the partners we choose, for example), and mistakes in our speech—what’s often referred to as a “slip of the tongue”, or a “Freudian slip”—are some of the starting places for exploring that territory of the beyond (the unconscious).

Time—

Therapies of the psychoanalytic persuasion are not known to move quickly. We will need time to talk about the events of your life and sufficiently explore your upbringing. Further, since we are not consciously acquainted with, if not emphatically opposed to, the materials of our unconscious, it can take us many sessions to discuss certain topics. Being able to do so would count as progress, actually. Therapeutic effects can happen during sessions and in-between them, and even though it can take a while to get to whatever end we’re getting at, what happens while we’re working together can be a kind of ripening and slow awakening all its own.