Psychoanalytic psychotherapy

It matters to me that you feel relaxed and accepted enough with me to be able to express everything that comes to mind (free-associate). That is when we gain access to your inner world (unconscious content), which shows us where the problem really lies and how to move forward.

People do not come to therapy to be analyzed, but to seek help so that they can live in a way that is less tormented, less lonely, less empty or less deprived of a sense of self. (Ogden, T.)

I work with the causes of distress, not only with the distress as it is expressed. Once we find the cause, and over the course of the psychotherapeutic process, the symptoms often ease or disappear. I listen for what words, feelings and imagination are truly communicating, and for how your patterns from the past show up in our relationship.

Someone who comes to psychotherapy usually has difficulties in relationships. It may be about how you experience yourself, what intimate or work relationships stir up in you, or perhaps your relationship with the world.

At times we experience ourselves and others through the past, in which the psyche organised itself in a way that no longer serves us today. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is suitable for working through difficult emotional distress, and also for improving the quality of your life — a better understanding of yourself.

Many a difficulty can return even once we have learned to manage it. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy goes deeper: we work on the causes of difficulties and not only on symptoms, with the unconscious, which shows itself in recurring patterns and relationships. Because this reveals itself in the relationship between us, what can change is not only what troubles you but also how you experience yourself and others, reaching down to the personality itself. That is why it is often suitable when difficulties have accompanied you for a long time or keep returning. I am guided by the thinking of psychoanalysts such as Wilfred Bion and Thomas Ogden.

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy can last from a few months to a few years. The duration depends on the therapeutic goal and on how long the difficulties have been present. Where developmental difficulties are involved, the process takes longer. Where you are satisfied with the symptoms easing, the process is generally shorter.

One psychotherapy session lasts 45 to 50 minutes; usually once a week, and by arrangement sometimes several times a week.

The first meeting is for you to see how I work, how we connect and, above all, for us to look at how I can help you. Together we also find out whether psychoanalytic psychotherapy suits you.

I offer individual psychotherapy also online (by video call), in Slovenian and English. Online psychotherapy proceeds in the same way as in person. I also regularly work with Slovenes abroad who cannot have psychotherapy in their mother tongue in person.