Approach
“A psychoanalyst’s task is to come to know his patients.”
Joan and Neville Symington
Method
How I think about the work
I treat psychological life as something organised in relationships. What often matters is how experience is internalised and recreated in the present.
Change tends to arrive indirectly, through shifts in how experience can be thought. I am cautious about premature certainty, including my own.
Orientation
My training and clinical orientation sit within contemporary psychoanalysis, with a post-Bionian field perspective as a central reference point. I see the analytic situation as a jointly constituted field.
This suggests a way of working that is attentive to what emerges in the analytic situation as a whole, not only to individual history or symptom reduction.
What I mean by listening
I use my own responses as part of the instrument of listening, while treating them as material to be examined. Interpretation, when it is used, is not delivered as explanation but offered as a proposition whose effects matter more than its completeness.
Neutrality, authority, and the question of change
Neutrality, as I understand it, is not emotional absence, and authority in this work is mostly the authority of the frame and regularity. I do not try to motivate, coach, or lead.
Limits of the work
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is not the right tool for every situation. It tends to suit people who can tolerate an exploratory process and who are able to meet regularly. If you need rapid symptom management, structured behavioural programs, or urgent stabilisation, other approaches may be more appropriate.
I do not provide crisis services. If there is significant risk or acute instability, the first priority is safety and appropriate local support.
A note on writing and public work
ⓘ My writing is not intended as self-help content or a substitute for psychotherapy.