Treatments: Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

The primary goal of psychoanalytic psychotherapy is to gain insight or self-understanding (enhancing conscious awareness of unconscious material, as well as the relationship between past and present), allowing personality change, and greater freedom in making life choices, and freedom from symptoms. It is a treatment that understands the impact of early life, even childhood, and development, on the patient’s personality and difficulties in living and interpersonal struggles. It stresses the importance of the “therapeutic relationship” in working through these difficulties.

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is a less formal and less intensive derivative of psychoanalysis. Instead of meeting 4 or 5 times per week, the patient and therapist meet 1 to 3 times per week. Instead of lying on a couch the patient and therapist sit face to face and instead of taking many years it may take months, but the methods of the treatment are similar, especially linking past to the present, and using the relationship that develops as a very special place for the patient to develop insight.

Dr. Oddy was trained in psychoanalytic technique and psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapy at Cornell – Payne Whitney Clinic and the William Alanson White Institute both in New York, New York.