San Francisco Contemporary Psychoanalysis

Have you been in psychotherapy before but still feel stuck and want more from your life and relationships? Do you want to get to the underlying issues that affect your relationship with yourself and others? Are you curious about how your mind works?

Contemporary psychoanalysis is an in-depth therapeutic method of exploring the mind to more deeply understand yourself in the context of a relationship with a psychoanalyst. Becoming more mindful of your here and now experience with a psychoanalyst can provide greater freedom and choice allowing for the possibility of a richer, more fulfilling and embodied life.

What is Psychoanalysis?

This intensive, highly individualized process of therapy addresses the complexity of the mind with a focus on unconscious or implicit mental processes. Freud first theorized this method of working as an investigation of the unconscious mind in order to understand how what is out of awareness influences our current, most relevant interactions with ourselves and others.

Working with a psychoanalyst often means meeting most days in a week, and can involve laying on the couch. Using the couch typically facilitates speaking more freely about what comes to mind allowing for what may not surface otherwise to come into view. In this process of thinking about and experiencing yourself in different ways, difficulties and suffering are better able to be understood and therefore transformed.

Kirsten is a member and faculty of San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis which offers rigorous and extensive training on the practice of psychoanalysis.