What are the differences between Psychoanalytic Therapy and Counselling?
– Jacqueline Ferguson There is often concern that psychoanalytic psychotherapy might encourage an unending dependence of the patient upon the therapist. However, a more careful examination of this cartoon reveals a different truth. When things go well during the course of a psychoanalytic psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, patients internalise the relationship with the therapist. This internalisation not only supports them during the therapy, survives the end of the therapy, and the death – real or metaphorical – of the therapist, but continues to grow afterwards so that the patient becomes stronger, more able to be truly independent, and also less liable to fall ill, than they were before therapy. The therapy does this by addressing unconscious aspects of the patient which feel unacceptable to him or her. This itself can give rise to some discomfort about psychoanalytic psychotherapy, with the question: “is this really good for you?” Levels of psychotherapy Cawley’s idea of a gradation
