Online psychoanalysis
How Online Psychoanalysis Works
You might come to psychoanalysis because something in your life has become difficult to manage, because you keep ending up in a situation you thought you had learned to avoid, or because your own explanations for what you do have begun to sound suspiciously well rehearsed. In our online sessions, we talk about what is happening and follow the connections between your feelings, thoughts, history, and choices. The conversation can begin with a problem you want help with or with the wish to know yourself better. Neither requires a grand justification.
Reasons to begin
What Brings You Here
You may be dealing with persistent anxiety or low mood, struggling in a relationship, or finding that an apparently simple decision has become an elaborate operation. Perhaps you are hard on yourself in ways you can recognize but cannot seem to stop. Perhaps life looks reasonably functional from the outside, while maintaining it takes more effort than anyone realizes. You do not need to arrive with a polished account of what is wrong. Part of the work is finding out which questions are worth asking.
Feelings run through these experiences, including the ones that do not initially look like emotional problems. They affect your mood, what catches your attention, which demands feel manageable, and what you expect other people to do. Anxiety may be obvious when it arrives in force and much harder to spot in the precautions that have gradually organized your day. An old disappointment may have something to do with a choice you are making now, even if you have never thought to put the two in the same sentence. We pay attention to such connections because the name of a difficulty rarely tells us enough about how it works in your life.
The conversation
What Happens in a Psychoanalytic Session?
You can start with something that happened this week, a difficulty you have known for years, a dream, a memory, or a thought you nearly decided was too strange to mention. I ask questions, look for connections, offer interpretations, and explain concepts when they help us understand what we have found. We might spend time with a particular feeling, examine an assumption that appeared halfway through a story, or notice that what you want and what you keep doing are pulling in different directions. An individual session gives us the time to follow an idea past the explanation you had ready when you arrived.
Suppose you tell me about a conversation that left you furious. We might look at what the other person said and what you understood them to mean, then notice how quickly that meaning became certain. Perhaps the anger has a familiar shape. Perhaps another feeling appeared just before it and barely got a chance to register. We would not need to decide in advance which of those possibilities is the important one; we would follow what comes up and see where it leads. That is closer to how psychoanalysis works than applying a general explanation to everyone who gets angry.
The conversation itself is also part of the material. If you find yourself wanting to impress me, expecting criticism, withholding something, or feeling irritated by a question, we can be interested in that too. Those responses may tell us something about what is happening between us, what you have come to expect in other relationships, or both. They do not need to be translated into a profound lesson on the spot. We have time to notice them, return to them, and understand them alongside the rest of your life.
As the work develops, we may find that situations you considered unrelated have something in common. We can examine why a response makes sense to you even when you dislike its consequences, and work out ideas to try when that response turns up again. Sometimes an explanation changes what you do; sometimes you understand a pattern quite clearly and still repeat it. Then we have more to investigate. I do not run sessions from a curriculum or send you home with a worksheet disguised as a revelation.
The affective perspective
Why Feelings Matter
My approach draws on affective science, which studies the biological systems involved in feeling and behavior. We are born with emotional capacities that have a long evolutionary history. Experience then shapes what activates them, what becomes associated with them, and how we learn to respond. This helps explain why a feeling can be entirely real, powerful, and worth understanding while still giving you a poor account of what is happening around you.
That knowledge is useful in the room. We can distinguish feelings you have been treating as one, look at what a response accomplishes, and trace how it acquired its force. An evolutionary explanation is sometimes illuminating; at other times, the more useful question concerns a particular relationship or something that happened last Tuesday. The point of knowing the science is to ask better questions about your experience, not to turn the session into a lecture about the ancestral brain.
What changes
Self-Knowledge and Change
Self-exploration is what we do in these conversations; self-knowledge is something you build through them. Knowing that you tend to withdraw, for example, tells you less than understanding when you withdraw, what you expect would happen if you stayed, and what withdrawal does for you. The fuller account gives you a better chance of recognizing the response while it is taking shape and deciding whether you want to follow it.
This kind of knowledge can also be valuable without an immediate problem to solve. It is your life, after all, and you are the only person who has to live every minute of it. Understanding more about what you want, what you avoid, and why certain experiences matter so much to you is reason enough to pay attention. It can also give you more agency over how you function, including the moments when your usual response has been making decisions on your behalf.
Another setting
Group Analysis
I also offer ongoing online analytic groups of up to eight people. Members join when a place opens, and there is no set topic or course of lessons to work through. You can bring your thoughts, feelings, relationships, and experiences into the group. You can also learn from what happens there as people speak, listen, disagree, hold back, or discover that someone else has understood them quite differently from how they intended.
I help the group examine those exchanges as part of the work. A familiar expectation may appear in the way you respond to another member; a feeling you usually keep out of view may become easier to recognize when someone else expresses it. The group offers several perspectives and relationships to think with, and its continuity gives them time to develop. It is its own form of psychoanalysis, with possibilities that differ from working individually.
Practical details
Getting Started
Individual sessions take place online and last 50 minutes; double sessions last 90 minutes. Group meetings last 120 minutes. If you are interested, get in touch and we can talk about what brings you and whether individual or group work would suit you.
See session fees and practical information, or contact me with a question.
My practice does not provide crisis intervention.