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Psychoanalysis

Don’t Let the Word Keep You from the Work

If “psychoanalysis” sounds cold, dusty, or meant for someone else, plenty of people in real pain feel the same and skip past it. In plain terms, psychoanalysis connects the dots between your past and your present: how your family, your relationships, and your earliest experiences shaped who you became. My work is contemporary psychoanalysis: relational, trauma-informed, and attachment-informed.

Let Your Old Patterns Show Up Here

The patterns that hurt most were learned with other people: the ones who raised you, partners, friends. They have to show up in a relationship before they can change. Our work becomes a place to experience something different, including hard moments.

We follow what comes up: last night’s dream, a thought you’d normally skip, a feeling about me that echoes someone else entirely. None of it is random. All of it is data.

Slowly, the parts of you steering from behind the scenes come into view, and you get a say. Picture your mind as a house with rooms you live in and corridors you avoid. We go into each one to sweep and restore until it feels livable, as good on the outside as on the inside.

Meet Often Enough to Feel the Difference

Sessions run anywhere from once to five times a week. More contact helps someone tightly wound open up, and it helps someone who’s falling apart stay in one piece. Frequency works like learning a language or training for something physical: once a week gets you one result, and several times a week gets you something you feel.

Some patients use the analytic couch and stop editing themselves once my face is out of sight. Others sit up. If a crisis hits between sessions, ask for an extra one.

Find Out if Psychoanalysis is a Good Fit for You.

It tends to fit if some of this resonates. You don’t need all of it.

  • You have a rich inner life: dreams, symbols, and metaphor already make sense to you
  • You’re genuinely suffering, even if your life looks fine from the outside
  • You notice the same relationship pattern showing up no matter who the other person is
  • You’re carrying childhood or developmental trauma, even if you’ve never called it that
  • You can commit to consistent, frequent sessions over time

The work asks for consistency: coming regularly, saying what’s on your mind (including what feels trivial or embarrassing), and staying with it when it’s slow or frustrating. It’s measured in months and, if we’re being honest, years. Trust builds over time, and I’ll never ask you to take it on faith. Every psychoanalyst in training goes through this work first, and I completed my psychoanalytic training at PINC, so I know what I’m asking.

Watch the Small Changes Add Up

Change shows up in small ways. You catch the old pattern while it’s happening. You stay in the hard conversation instead of shutting down.

The voice in your head gets a little kinder, and the people close to you notice. One day you notice yourself thinking: “I can finally say anything in here.”

And when life brings what’s genuinely hard, as it will, you meet it differently. This is the capacity to bear the unbearable, with someone right beside you while you learn how.

Make Your Peace with the Word Later

You don’t have to love the word to begin. Bring any question, the couch included, to a free 20-minute consultation.

Request a Free 20-Minute Consultation

Call me today at (415) 993-1301

Talk to Me First

That sentence you almost said is still waiting. It doesn’t need to arrive polished, and the dream doesn’t need to make sense yet. There will be a pause nobody hurries, and room for whatever you bring into it.

A free 20-minute consultation is the best way to find out whether this is the right fit. I can usually see new patients the same week or the week after. Bring the sentence with you.

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