FAQ

Not exactly — though some analysts think differently. Psychotherapy is a treatment method for mental illness: it seeks, investigates, and addresses a disorder or symptom that the person wants to be relieved of. Psychoanalysis — or at least psychoanalysis as I understand it — is not a treatment method, but a method of exploring a personality in its entirety. It aims to introduce the person to themselves and to think alongside the patient about what they make of what they see.

Both analysis and psychotherapy can have therapeutic effects. The difference is that psychoanalysis is broader in scope: it is interested in getting closer to how a person lives their life — their suffering and their joy alike. Both tend to open up the possibility of building deeper, more intimate, and more nourishing bonds and relationships.

No, the only professional properly qualified to do this is a psychiatrist, who has medical training. Only a qualified physician can prescribe medication. This is prohibited for other professionals such as psychologists or psychoanalysts.

Psychology is a broad field of knowledge, encompassing various therapeutic and non-therapeutic approaches, such as: CBT (cognitive behavioral therapies), humanistic therapies, school psychology, sports psychology, traffic psychology, etc.

Psychoanalysis can be considered a branch of psychology, but it is a distinct field of knowledge all together because it starts from the premise that we have an unconscious and it deals with studying, exploring, and analyzing how a person relates to their unconscious.

That's hard to pin down precisely. Each session lasts 50 minutes, but the work itself is another matter, psychoanalysis isn't an exact science. It's a method of exploring the way a person thinks, lives, and feels, and it unfolds at the pace each person needs to recognize the implications of what they do, think, and feel. This process can take months or years, and it also depends on how far each person wants to go on this journey alongside their analyst.

We start with a conversation; it's "just" a matter of starting to talk. Just kidding, it's not imperative that you need to talk, and moreover, sometimes it's not advantageous to talk. We can think about this together. The psychoanalytic method is so powerful that it doesn't require talking; it transcends that barrier, because human communication doesn't occur only through speech. Just because a person doesn't want to talk/can't/doesn't know how (to talk) it doesn't mean that's an impediment to analysis.