Self-Exploration with Psychoanalysis
How much of yourself do you truly know?
How much of yourself, do you think, has never been seen? Thoughts you never name; forgotten memories; sleeping wishes, faint impressions; private associations between things that seem unrelated, and vast variousness of feelings. Some of your experience floats on the edge of awareness, while most sprawls beyond the routes you ordinarily take through. I want to take you there.
Why? Because no one can ever know what it means to be you. Without your presence, much of yourself will forever remain invisible. You are allowed to grant your own experience time and attention.
Psychoanalytic conversations offer an unhurried hour of your full presence. I help you attend to what else passes unnoticed and follow what you otherwise don’t take time to pursue. Together, we linger over memories, consider feelings, and explore connections. It’s creating space for yourself by yourself.
POINTS OF ENTRY
What May Bring You Here
Self-Knowledge as a Standard
THE PRIVILEGE OF KNOWING YOURSELF
Self-exploration requires no justification through suffering or the promise that you will emerge as an improved version of yourself. Knowing yourself is reason enough. You are the only person who can ever know what it means to be you.
Find Out Who You Have Become
YOUR INDIVIDUALITY IN QUESTION
A life transition can loosen the roles and certainties by which you have known yourself. At other times, identity grows indistinct without one decisive event. We examine what has shaped you and form a more coherent understanding of who you are.
Find Out What You Are Changing
SELF-KNOWLEDGE IN THE SERVICE OF CHANGE
Patterns and reactions can persist despite your determination to alter them. We look for the feelings, assumptions, and experiences that sustain them. The resulting understanding gives deliberate change a better start.
THE PRACTICE OF GUIDED SELF-EXPLORATION
What Is Psychoanalytic Exploration?
In psychoanalytic exploration, we examine the different aspects and layers of who you are, deepening your self-knowledge. We observe your experience: memories, feelings, thoughts, associations, wishes, reactions, relationships, values, and habits. You provide the essence; I bring the conceptual knowledge that guides our inquiry and helps us see where everything comes together. We paint a portrait of your self, connecting main events, forgotten and overlooked matters, together with details that seemed faint, fragmentary, or contradictory, forming an increasingly coherent self-understanding. An account of what has shaped you, who you are, and why.
HOW IT DIFFERS
What we are not doing
Related services answer to other needs.
Unlike in psychotherapy, we do not treat mental health issues, mitigate troublesome behaviors, or mend relationships.
Unlike in coaching, we do not focus on optimization, productivity, or performance.
Unlike in education, we do not transmit general psychological knowledge or teach universal skills.
Unlike in personality assessment, we do not measure or rate your traits or place you in a category.
Our Conversations in Practice
How We Work Together
ONE TO ONE
Private self-inquiry
Regular, confidential one-to-one video meetings devoted to the subject of you. We follow what comes to mind and notice what returns: your feelings, thoughts, memories, and reactions, connecting them into patterns of subjective meaning.
SMALL GROUPS
Self-inquiry salons
Small-group conversations organized around a shared subject. Each of us examines our experience from our own perspective and discovers the different forms they take in others. The contrasts open routes that may never appear in solitude
EXPLORATIONS
Lectures, workshops, and courses
Psychological knowledge with introspective practice. We focus on one subject, such as emotion, memory, identity, personality, the unconscious, and similar. We include opportunities to apply the methods to your own experience
Your Accomplice in Knowing Yourself
Malka Ceh, PhD
Knowing the facts of your life does not necessarily tell you who you are or how your self has made use of them. You may see what happens while remaining unsure why you feel a certain way, repeat a pattern, or lose yourself among the roles of everyday life. You may also sense that the familiar you is only part of the self you really are. Exploratory Psychoanalysis makes more of you available for examination, and together we look at how the parts relate to one another.
I am a psychoanalyst with a PhD in evolutionary anthropology. I use psychoanalysis outside the clinical framework for making you more fully known to yourself. We do this by bringing more of your experience into awareness and connecting elements that may initially seem fragmentary, contradictory, or unrelated into a coherent understanding of who you are and how you came to be.