About Psychoanalysis

History of Psychoanalysis in Australia

A downloadable PDF providing the history of Psychoanalysis in Australia.

What is Psychoanalysis?

When people ask about psychoanalysis, they usually want to know about psychoanalytic treatment. Psychoanalysis has shown that we are often unaware of the meaning of personal experience and emotion, and that there are ways to find out about the meaning is. Exploring our unconscious mind can explain unhappiness as revealed in symptoms, troubling personality traits, recurrent difficulties in work or in love relationships, or disturbances in mood and self-esteem. Because these forces are unconscious, the advice of friends and family, the reading of self-help books, or even the most determined efforts of will, often fail to provide relief.

Psychoanalytic treatment brings the unconscious meaning of residues of personal experience to the fore. Psychoanalytic treatment demonstrates how these unconscious factors affect current relationships and patterns of behaviour. In order to help a person master these influences, psychoanalysis traces them back to their historical origins. This permits a person to see how they have changed and developed over time, thereby offering the potential to deal more constructively with their appearance in current life.

Analysis is an intimate partnership. The bonds created in the course of treatment create a safe environment for self-revelation. Through exploring the bonds of the partnership formed in treatment, not only does the person become aware of unconscious meanings, but the bonds themselves can reveal important ways in which difficulties can repeat themselves. The experience with the analyst is not simply intellectual, but is emotional and spans the range of human expressivity.

The relationship between patient and analyst is sometimes trivialised in cinematic portrayal, which can detract from the profound nature of the work, and mislead public perceptions.

Continuity in treatment is essential to developing the closeness and intimacy required for this form of self-exploration. Typically, meetings with the analyst take place four or five times a week. The person lies on a couch so as to better attend to their internal processes. The person sets their own pace and their own agenda for the treatment by saying everything that comes to mind, to the best of their ability.

The conditions of psychoanalytic treatment create a unique setting facilitating the emergence of aspects of the mind not accessible to other methods of observation. As the patient speaks, hints of the unconscious sources of current difficulties gradually begin to make themselves clear through certain repetitive patterns of behaviour, in the subjects which the person finds hard to talk about, and in the ways the person relates to the analyst.

The analyst helps by tending to the evolution of the therapeutic bond. This allows the analyst to make meaningful reflections on the person's difficulties. With these reflections, the person can refine, correct, reject, and further modify their thoughts and feelings. During the years that an analysis takes place, the person wrestles with these insights, going over them again and again with the analyst, and noting their influence on their experience in daily life, in fantasies, and in dreams. Through a joint effort with the analyst, the person comes to gain mastery over crippling life patterns, or over incapacitating symptoms. This new found mastery also helps to expand the freedom to work and to love. Over the course of time, the person's life - his or her behaviour, relationships, sense of self - changes in deep and abiding ways

Who Can Benefit from Psychoanalysis?

The best way to discover if psychoanalysis would be of benefit is to seek a consultation with a psychoanalyst. Psychoanalysis is a highly individualized treatment that optimistically relies on the person's innate potential for self healing and growth. To undergo psychoanalysis, a person must have demonstrated some ability to achieve some important satisfaction in life, and to have a sufficiently stable lifestyle to meet the requirements of the treatment process. This person may have already achieved important satisfactions -with friends, in marriage, in work, or through special interests and hobbies.

Despite such achievements, a person seeking psychoanalysis can have significant symptoms, which may include: depression or anxiety, sexual incapacities, or physical symptoms without any demonstrable underlying physical cause. The person may be plagued by private rituals or compulsions or repetitive thoughts of which no one else is aware. Another may live a constricted life of isolation and loneliness, incapable of feeling close to anyone. A victim of childhood sexual abuse might suffer from an inability to trust others. Some people come to analysis because of repeated failures in work or in love, brought about not by chance but by self- destructive patterns of behaviour. Others seek analysis because their way of being restricts choices and the opportunity for pleasures. Some people seek psychoanalytic treatment because other approaches have not resolved psychological problems, or only temporarily so.

Whatever the problem a thorough evaluation is required to determine if psychoanalysis is properly indicated. Sometimes, the evaluation takes place over a short series of interviews thereby permitting the person and the analyst some experience of each other within the therapeutic setting.

Who is a Psychoanalyst?

Before beginning an analysis, the practitioner's credentials should be known. Psychoanalysts trained under the auspices of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society have had very rigourous and extensive clinical education. Candidates accepted for training must meet high ethical, psychological, and professional standards. Candidates are medical practitioners, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers or other health professionals who have have had intensive clinical experience. On being accepted for training, they follow a structured program of theoretical and clinical seminars, have thorough supervision on training cases, and have their own personal psychoanalysis. The training program usually extends over five to seven years. On completion, candidates become Associate Members of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society and Members of the International Psychoanalytical Association, the body which monitors standards for Psychoanalytical practice world wide, and which has over 10,000 members.

How to contact a Psychoanalyst

To arrange a consultation with a Psychoanalyst, contact the Branch Chair in your State.

Sydney:  Ms Kaye Nelson
email: kayenel@bigpond.net.au

Melbourne:  Dr Leon Fail
email: leonfail@bigpond.com.au

Adelaide: Dr Gil Anaf
email: ganaf@ozemail.com.au

Branches

The Australian Psychoanalytical Society has three Branches based in Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney.