Service
Psychodynamic therapy
A kind of therapy that listens for what repeats
Overview
Some difficulties are not solved by “more strategies.” They persist because they are tied to how you have learned to relate, protect yourself, and make meaning. Psychodynamic therapy offers a careful space to explore these deeper patterns, so you can loosen what feels fixed and live with more freedom and steadiness.
Jungian Informed
Some clients arrive with a particular kind of question. Not only “How do I feel better?” but “What is trying to emerge in me?” A Jungian-informed stance treats symptoms as meaningful communications, not errors to delete. It emphasises symbolic life, imagination, and the psyche’s capacity to self-organise when it is listened to with seriousness.
What it focuses on
Patterns with a mythic texture: recurring relational roles, life themes, and the sense of being “caught” in a familiar story.
Shadow and defensiveness: the parts of the self disowned, avoided, or projected onto others.
Dreams and symbols: as a language of the unconscious, offering images that may clarify conflict, desire, fear, or development.
Individuation: not perfection, but greater wholeness, where conflicting parts can coexist without splitting or self-hatred.
Lacanian Informed
A Lacanian-informed approach is less about giving you the “right explanation” and more about listening to how your suffering is organised in language, desire, and relationship. It treats the person not as a bundle of traits, but as someone shaped by speech, history, and the demands of being recognised by others.
In practice, this does not mean intellectualising your pain. It means taking your words seriously, including the slips, repetitions, jokes, and sudden silences.
What it focuses on
How symptoms are structured: not only what you feel, but how it returns, where it appears, and what it “does” in your life.
Desire and ambivalence: what you want, what you avoid wanting, and how desire becomes knotted with guilt, duty, or fantasy.
The Other: the internalised audience whose expectations can organise anxiety, shame, perfectionism, or a chronic sense of not being enough.
Repetition: how we recreate familiar scenes, often to keep something painful but known at a tolerable distance.
How it works
1) Assessment and therapeutic frame
We begin by clarifying what brings you now, what you want from therapy, and what helps you feel safe enough to think and feel. We also set the “frame” of the work: practical boundaries, confidentiality, session rhythm, and an agreed way of working together.
2) An initial psychodynamic formulation and focus
Over the first sessions, we develop a working hypothesis about the patterns maintaining distress. This often includes recurring emotional themes, relationship cycles, self-criticism or shame, and the protective strategies that keep feelings at a distance. Where helpful, we agree a focus for the work, while keeping it open to revision as new material emerges.
3) The middle phase: working-through in session
Therapy becomes a place to notice patterns in real time. We explore feelings, meanings, and defences as they arise, and we link current difficulties to repeating relational expectations and internal conflicts. At times, we may also attend to what happens between us in the therapy relationship, because these patterns often show up most clearly there. This is where insight becomes emotionally usable, not only intellectually understood.
4) Consolidation and endings
As change consolidates, we review what has shifted, what remains vulnerable, and how you will carry gains forward. Endings are part of the therapy, not an afterthought: we plan them, reflect on what separation brings up, and use the final phase to strengthen autonomy, continuity, and self-trust.
54
studies (33 randomised trials; n = 3,946) in a meta-analysis found short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy for depression outperformed control conditions at post-treatment (d = 0.49–0.69)
14
randomised trials (n = 1,073) in a meta-analysis found psychodynamic therapy for anxiety disorders was more effective than control conditions (g = 0.64)
10
controlled studies (n = 971) in a meta-analysis of long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy (≥1 year or ≥50 sessions) found better outcomes than less intensive psychotherapy for complex mental disorders (between-group effect sizes = 0.44–0.68).
FAQ
Learn about our interview process and anything
else you have in mind
What kind of concerns can psychodynamic therapy help with?
What kind of concerns can psychodynamic therapy help with?
How is it different from CBT?
How is it different from CBT?
What happens in a typical session?
What happens in a typical session?
Do we have to talk about childhood?
Do we have to talk about childhood?
Is it just “talking,” or is there a structure?
Is it just “talking,” or is there a structure?
How long does psychodynamic therapy take?
How long does psychodynamic therapy take?
How do I know if this approach is right for me?
How do I know if this approach is right for me?
References
References
Service
Psychodynamic therapy
We create a world with more founders and do work that will have an impact on the world today, tomorrow, and beyond
Overview
Some difficulties are not solved by “more strategies.” They persist because they are tied to how you have learned to relate, protect yourself, and make meaning. Psychodynamic therapy offers a careful space to explore these deeper patterns, so you can loosen what feels fixed and live with more freedom and steadiness.
Jungian Informed
Some clients arrive with a particular kind of question. Not only “How do I feel better?” but “What is trying to emerge in me?” A Jungian-informed stance treats symptoms as meaningful communications, not errors to delete. It emphasises symbolic life, imagination, and the psyche’s capacity to self-organise when it is listened to with seriousness.
What it focuses on
Patterns with a mythic texture: recurring relational roles, life themes, and the sense of being “caught” in a familiar story.
Shadow and defensiveness: the parts of the self disowned, avoided, or projected onto others.
Dreams and symbols: as a language of the unconscious, offering images that may clarify conflict, desire, fear, or development.
Individuation: not perfection, but greater wholeness, where conflicting parts can coexist without splitting or self-hatred.
Lacanian Informed
A Lacanian-informed approach is less about giving you the “right explanation” and more about listening to how your suffering is organised in language, desire, and relationship. It treats the person not as a bundle of traits, but as someone shaped by speech, history, and the demands of being recognised by others.
In practice, this does not mean intellectualising your pain. It means taking your words seriously, including the slips, repetitions, jokes, and sudden silences.
What it focuses on
How symptoms are structured: not only what you feel, but how it returns, where it appears, and what it “does” in your life.
Desire and ambivalence: what you want, what you avoid wanting, and how desire becomes knotted with guilt, duty, or fantasy.
The Other: the internalised audience whose expectations can organise anxiety, shame, perfectionism, or a chronic sense of not being enough.
Repetition: how we recreate familiar scenes, often to keep something painful but known at a tolerable distance.
How it works
1) Assessment and therapeutic frame
We begin by clarifying what brings you now, what you want from therapy, and what helps you feel safe enough to think and feel. We also set the “frame” of the work: practical boundaries, confidentiality, session rhythm, and an agreed way of working together.
2) An initial psychodynamic formulation and focus
Over the first sessions, we develop a working hypothesis about the patterns maintaining distress. This often includes recurring emotional themes, relationship cycles, self-criticism or shame, and the protective strategies that keep feelings at a distance. Where helpful, we agree a focus for the work, while keeping it open to revision as new material emerges.
3) The middle phase: working-through in session
Therapy becomes a place to notice patterns in real time. We explore feelings, meanings, and defences as they arise, and we link current difficulties to repeating relational expectations and internal conflicts. At times, we may also attend to what happens between us in the therapy relationship, because these patterns often show up most clearly there. This is where insight becomes emotionally usable, not only intellectually understood.
4) Consolidation and endings
As change consolidates, we review what has shifted, what remains vulnerable, and how you will carry gains forward. Endings are part of the therapy, not an afterthought: we plan them, reflect on what separation brings up, and use the final phase to strengthen autonomy, continuity, and self-trust.
54
studies (33 randomised trials; n = 3,946) in a meta-analysis found short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy for depression outperformed control conditions at post-treatment (d = 0.49–0.69)
14
randomised trials (n = 1,073) in a meta-analysis found psychodynamic therapy for anxiety disorders was more effective than control conditions (g = 0.64)
10
controlled studies (n = 971) in a meta-analysis of long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy (≥1 year or ≥50 sessions) found better outcomes than less intensive psychotherapy for complex mental disorders (between-group effect sizes = 0.44–0.68).
FAQ
Learn about our interview process and
anything else you have in mind
What kind of concerns can psychodynamic therapy help with?
How is it different from CBT?
What happens in a typical session?
Do we have to talk about childhood?
Is it just “talking,” or is there a structure?
How long does psychodynamic therapy take?
How do I know if this approach is right for me?
References