What is analytical psychotherapy and who is it for?
What is analytical psychotherapy and who is it for?
Analytical psychotherapy provides help focused on the subject’s internal conflicts. This approach is based on the verbal interpretation of the patient’s words and aims to clarify his behaviours and affects in order to make the internal conflicts he encounters disappear.
Within the framework of an analytical therapy, the practitioner can be led to leave his neutral posture to replace a benevolent and structuring parental image.
Analytical therapies have in common with psychoanalysis, the reference to the psychic unconscious and take into account its manifestations. However, the specificity of this type of therapy is that it is practised in a face-to-face configuration between the practitioner and the subject, in a non-neutral atmosphere, favourable to benevolence.
During a session, the therapist focuses his work on the patient’s unconscious and on the interpretation of the verbal material that he proposes, in order to find links between current difficulties and past experiences and the conflicts repressed, not resolved in the patient’s unconscious.
Analytical therapy can sometimes depart clearly from the patient’s visible symptoms to explore in-depth the patient’s psyche, through free verbal association, dream analysis, diary keeping and transference phenomena (projection of unconscious desires or situations from the client to his therapist).
Analytical therapies can benefit all subjects with an inner suffering, a feeling of confinement or diffuse malaise. Analytical psychotherapy allows the exploration of the psyche and the improvement of self-knowledge.
Certain disorders concerning young children and adolescents with learning difficulties can benefit from this type of therapy, revealing the psychological suffering at the origin of these difficulties.
More broadly, analytical psychotherapy can be used for patients with language disorders, phobias, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, or depressive disorders.
It is important to note that analytical psychotherapy can be combined with other types of psychiatric follow-up and drug treatment.