We may step into the consulting room ashamed of ourselves, afraid for ourselves, wrapped in old fears or disconnected from our own experience.

We may feel unable to shift ourselves from repetitive behaviours, choices and relationship patterns.

We may speak, without understanding what we are saying, without knowing what we know.

We generally don’t know much of what causes our emotions and behaviours.

Freud believed that the unconscious, that which is outside our awareness, can deeply influence our lives. Moreover, that it is the gap between what we know and what we don’t know which makes us suffer. His psychoanalytic method is an attempt to deal with this gap, and the conflict between knowing and not knowing. Psychoanalysis takes the unconscious into account starting from the truth that speaking conveys, even if we are not aware of it.

Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are a talking cure, centred on the creative power of speech. They involve speaking about your experience, past and present, relationships, dreams, memory, desires and the significant and seemingly insignificant events in your life. By speaking freely, and with time, a different meaning emerges from your words and changes previous ways of thinking.

This process is an opportunity to understand something about what has brought you to where you are in your life, to reach insight and relief.

If you are considering this exploration you are thinking of creating a time for the things you cannot make sense of, for those things which shape and limit your life. This can be your time, a time for yourself: unique, and in which you unfold what has been carefully folded (and which in words can be revealed) to break old patterns and make changes in your life.