THERAPY    
There are many different talking therapies available. This page gives a brief description of what one specific type of talking therapy, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, can offer. 
    People seek therapy for many reasons, some of which are not even easy to formulate. You may be feeling depressed, anxious or stressed, struggling with work or relationships, or generally unsure of what direction to  take in your life. Therapy provides an opportunity to talk in confidence to a trained listener who will help you make sense of what is troubling you and seek to  understand what has brought you to this point. Usually sessions take place at a regular time each week (many people come once a week, but also twice or three times a week), and sessions last for 50 minutes. An initial consultation will give you the opportunity to talk about what has brought you to consider therapy and what you hope to get from it, and for both you and the therapist to decide whether you could work together. For more information, please see the "Location" and "Fees" tabs under "About Me".

PSYCHOANALYSIS    
Talking therapies began with psychoanalysis, which comprises a diverse range of theories on what causes our emotional suffering. These theories have been through numerous revisions over the last century; many have been rejected and new theories have been put forward. 
    What remains unique to most psychoanalytic thinking, perhaps, is its suggestion that we are often unaware of what truly motivates us (the area of the unconscious), may not realise how powerfully our earlier experience affects our ways of relating in the present, and often defend against thoughts and feelings we find unacceptable, or unbearable, in a variety of ways. Psychoanalysis focuses on the meaning of our experience, and gets at this through a careful, collaborative exploration of how we speak about it.