Psychotherapy
In Falmouth
​
About
Psychotherapy
If you are thinking about therapy you may be finding life more challenging than usual, perhaps feeling low and unmotivated, disenchanted with your life and struggling to find meaning. You may be stuck in destructive patterns or questioning a relationship, an occupation or belief and feel frozen, unable to enact the change you need. Or perhaps you are continually anxious, struggling to find enjoyment while seemingly small things overwhelm you making day-to-day existence harder to navigate.
​
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy responds to you as an individual in your unique ways of thinking and being. So, as we develop a therapeutic relationship I invite you to go wherever your mind or body leads whether that be thoughts, sensations, memories, fantasies, dreams or worries and offer you the space to give words or images to your troubles and another mind, without judgement, with which to think about them. Psychotherapy is a dialogue, one that you will have with yourself as much as with me and that will, over time, enable you to unravel your difficulties and discover other ways of being that enable you to flourish.
"In the dying of anything walks a creature looking for it's song:
huge, it bends down planets that it might ask them
the ways back to life again..."
​
In the dying of anything
Brian Patten
Psychotherapy is typically longer term and offered on a regular weekly basis, sometimes twice weekly. However, for some, where there is a specific problem to work through, shorter term work is more appropriate. Sessions are around 50 minutes and we usually work with whatever you bring to the session whether that be experiences, thoughts, dreams, worries or life-situations. Psychoanalysis attends to the ways we speak about ourselves and the stories we tell - it is this mode of attentiveness that facilitates new and imaginative ways of thinking and being.
Psychoanalysis as the 'talking cure' is a type of psychotherapy developed by Freud in the early 20th century and revolves around his theory of the unconscious and the idea that much of how we think, behave and act is driven by motivations we may not be conscious of. The way I work draws upon more contemporary and critical formulations of psychoanalysis that consider the 21st century subject and the social/political context we find ourselves in.
I work with individuals and couples.
I believe Psychotherapy is for everyone, and am thoughtful about the complex ways in which aspects of our identity, like class and race may intersect with others such as sexuality and gender. Suffering takes many forms and there doesn't have to be a diagnosis to justify therapy. I prefer to take a non-pathologising view of distress and disaffection and choose rather to reflect on it outside of the medical descriptions usually associated with it.
Articles about Psychoanalysis
Queer Theory and Psychoanalysis | Dr. Leon Brenner and Dr. Eve Watson
Class and Psychoanalysis: Landscapes of Inequality by Joanna Ryan