Welcome to Practical Psychoanalysis

How Psychoanalysis Differs from Psychotherapy

First thing first — a few definitions.

What is the difference between psychotherapy and psychoanalysis?

The talking cure

Psychotherapy is a rather generic term – social workers, counselors, psychologists and psychiatrists can all call themselves therapists. In fact, psychotherapy has been trending in the past decade, between online and virtual therapy apps and chats — I feel like everyone out there is a mental health expert. So much so that even though I myself am a trained mental health professional (went to graduate school for a clinical counseling degree), I am a bit bored with it. The fact that I’ve spent more than half my life learning about how the human mind, body and spirit work, probably adds to this boredom.

Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is an experience – you cannot call yourself a psychoanalyst without having done your own analysis. The same is not always true for psychotherapy – not all psychotherapists have gone through their own therapy (and they all need to).

Before there was psychotherapy, however, there was psychoanalysis. Freud invented the psychoanalytic method, or the talking cure, together with his friend and mentor Breuer, a Viennese psychiatrist, who worked with female hysterics (an old-fashioned diagnostic term for what today is classified as conversion disorder).

In his work with his patient Anna O., a pseudonym for Bertha Pappenheim, one of the first feminists and an Austrian writer, Breuer discovered that after she was able to speak about the origin of her symptoms, they disappeared. Hence, the talking cure.

The difference

The presumption that talking has healing powers fuels many psychotherapeutic practices today. No one argues against that. But words do have their limit. And that’s where psychoanalysis comes in. What is the difference between the two?

First, psychotherapy deals with what we call the ego, the I or the active agency with which you make decisions on a daily basis. In contrast, psychoanalysis deals with the unconscious – those experiences that are beyond language, outside of our awareness; the part of us that is vastly suppressed by culture, social norms, rules and regulations, and operates outside of all that, for better or for worse.

Second, the goals of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are also different. Psychotherapy attempts to restore a person’s relationship to the social norms and regulations, to offer a social adaptation that allows for better relationship to others and oneself. Psychoanalysis, however, works to restore a person’s relationship to their own desire — the desire that has driven our life from the get-go. While psychotherapy works to strengthen the ego, psychoanalysis works to strengthen the subject’s relationship to their own unconscious.

A different desire

Psychotherapists use their relationship with you, the client, to influence your decision-making, to teach coping strategies, to change behaviors or thoughts, and to modify the ways you relate to others. Psychoanalysts use the access they have to their own unconscious to guide and accompany you on a journey of getting acquainted with your own unconscious. As a result of this, you may reorganize the way you relate to yourself and your body with all of its human qualities — sexuality and relationships included. Ultimately, the goal of psychoanalysis is to give you access to your own desire — to a place of aesthetic experience that opens up your capacity (to borrow Willy Apollon’s definition of the human spirit) to imagine that which does not exist, to want it and to create it.

For more on this subject, stay tuned.