Note: I added my email to my profile after writing this. Feel free to reach out if you’re curious. I have a deep love for psychoanalysis.
I stumbled upon it by chance. I don’t know of a great patient introduction, but I linked some explainers on the ideas below.
Psychoanalysis as I understand it is about understanding your relationship patterns and changing them. The analysis I’m in works through free association, I speak what’s on my mind (including my most disgusting or hateful thoughts, criticisms of my therapist, doubts…) and my analyst mostly just listens, but occasionally pokes and prods, and sometimes opines. His role is partly to be a canvas against which my relationship patterns can present and partly to be an investigator trying to notice and observe behaviors of mine I might not be totally aware of.
It’s not just a matter of knowledge. Change in analysis seems to come through a felt experience, through the relationship with the analyst. I find myself talking and talking and one day I say something that I’ve known my whole life and yet never really said, and I start to connect it to all sorts of forgotten feelings, and it becomes a little less weighty, unstuck in time.
Because of my work in analysis I have developed a now 4 year long romantic relationship, several close friends, and become happier at work. But I still have lots of dissatisfaction and lack of meaning (in those same relationships and work) and that is what I spend most of my time talking about currently.
I’ve heard someone say psychoanalysis is about making you more free. Not in the civil liberties sense, but in a way that is almost a bit painful, as you will have more responsibility.
Personally I also have found the theory behind it rich and deeply insightful. Reading some of Freud (and others, like winnicott) has felt like something clicking in my head about people that I’ve wanted to understand for a long time.
If you like twitter you could try @jonathanshedler (he has a book too[1]) or @nyctherapist. Nancy McWilliams (Psychoanalytic Diagnosis) is supposed to be good if you want to understand the theory. I’ve actually really liked reading the original Freud. I also hear good things about Mitchell’s Freud and Beyond.
Less clinically oriented (and more lacanian) I also like the Why Theory? Podcast. But it really is less focused on psychological insight.
[1] https://jonathanshedler.com/PDFs/Shedler%20(2006)%20That%20w...