Psychoanalysis
in Los Angeles.

Most people, when they hear the word psychoanalysis, picture a couch. A silent, slightly fearsome man in a chair. Decades of treatment producing very little besides invoices. The word has hardened into a caricature — old-fashioned, opaque, vaguely European.

The reality of contemporary psychoanalytic work is quieter and more useful than that. It is a conversation, weekly or more often, between two people. One of them — the therapist — has spent years being trained to listen in a particular way: not only to what is said, but to the silences around it, the patterns that emerge in how something is said, the feelings that come up between you in the room. The other — the patient — comes with whatever they are bringing.

What distinguishes the work is its starting assumption: that much of what shapes our lives lives below the surface of awareness, and that simply being told to think differently — or to use a coping tool, or to challenge a thought — rarely reaches the place where things actually need to change.

The unconscious is not a metaphor.

We are, most of us, in the habit of treating the unconscious as a figure of speech — a slightly mystical word for “the stuff I am not currently thinking about.” Clinical experience suggests it is something more.

People repeat. The same kind of partner. The same kind of conflict at work. The same self-sabotage at the moment of success. There is often a logic to these patterns, but the logic is not available to consciousness. It belongs to a part of the mind that learned, long ago, to want certain things and fear certain others — and that has been quietly running the show ever since.

Psychoanalytic work is, at its core, an attempt to bring that part of the mind into the conversation. Not to manage it from a distance, but to know it. The change that follows from knowing is different from the change that follows from technique. It tends to last.

How the work moves.

In practice, sessions are open-ended. You speak about what is on your mind. I listen, ask, occasionally interpret — meaning, I offer a thought about what might be happening beneath what we are discussing. Over time, patterns emerge. We come to see, together, how certain feelings or behaviors organize themselves around certain experiences, often very old ones.

The relationship between us becomes, itself, a kind of instrument. The way you find yourself relating to me — what you want from me, what you fear from me, what you do not say — turns out to contain useful information about how you relate to everyone, and to yourself.

Who it tends to suit.

Psychoanalytic therapy is not for everyone. It asks for time, for commitment, for a willingness to sit with uncertainty. It is not a place for quick relief, though relief often does come.

It tends to suit adults who have a sense that something keeps returning — a feeling, a kind of relationship, a familiar impasse — and who want to understand it rather than only manage it. It tends to suit those who are intellectually curious, who read, who like to think. It tends to suit those who have tried shorter or more structured therapies and found them helpful but incomplete.

If any of that describes you, the work may be a fit.