Psychodynamic therapy is a ‘talking therapy’ treatment to help promote your mental health and wellbeing.
It aims to enable you to better understand the connections between your current patterns of relating and behaviour within your relationships and your current feelings of anxiety and/or depression.
Psychodynamic therapy is heavily informed by the theoretical models of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. It recognises how our early experience helps inform our current patterns of behaviour and mental health issues and symptoms. It aims to develop your self-awareness, self-understanding and emotional insight to help free you up more from the restrictions of repetitive patterns of negative thinking and behaviour.
The dynamic therapeutic approach of the therapist aims to develop your interpersonal skills and ability to better manage with difficulty as it arises within your life and relationships.
Research has identified there are seven features that distinguish psychodynamic therapy from other therapies;
- Focus on affect (your feelings, thoughts, ideas and beliefs) and expression of emotion
- Focus on your relationships
- Identify recurring themes and patterns in your life
- Exploration of your individual coping strategies and defensive behaviours
- Discussion of past experience
- Explore your experience of therapy
- Exploration of your wishes, dreams and beliefs
Psychodynamic therapy has a research base indicating it may benefit in many ways such as:
• Work on the underlying causes of your difficulties
• Explore and process trauma in your life
• Develop on your own capacities to cope with and manage difficulty in your life and relationships
• Develop your self-understanding to aid change within your current patterns of critical thinking
• Develop your relational and individual self-awareness to enable personal growth and to help facilitate behavioural change
Psychodynamic therapy has well documented research indicating its effectiveness across a range of mental health disorders, such as here and its efficacy for more entrenched treatment resistant mental health problems click here.
A recent meta-analysis of 47 RCTs, covering a 40 year period and meeting a rigorous criteria, indicated that psychodynamic therapy can be clinically effective for a range of common mental disorders including depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, somatoform disorders, personality disorders, eating disorders, complicated grief and post-traumatic stress disorder (Leichsenring & Klein 2014). The meta-analysis yielded a large effect size that continued to increase from termination to long-term follow-up indicating the benefits of once-weekly psychodynamic therapy may be long lasting and extend beyond symptom remission.
Yakely, J. Psychodynamic psychotherapy: developing the evidence base, Advances in psychiatric treatment (2014), vol. 20, 269–279 doi: 10.1192/apt.bp.113.012054