Approaching analysis and psychotherapy through a Jungian lens

I endeavour to provide a confidential and safe space in which I carefully listen to and reflect on a person’s account of the matters that are troubling them, the events in their daily life, their dreams, their symptoms, their symbolic imagery and their artwork. I carefully listen to and think about the way in which this material and other thoughts and feelings are expressed. I aspire to be sensitively attuned to the nature of the relationship between myself and my patients. I share my understanding and thoughts and invite feedback. In this way, through shared thinking and discussion, together we can try and understand the underlying issues. Over time, this process of talking, reflecting and thinking together is intended to diminish symptoms by altering the patient’s relationship with themselves. The aim is to encourage increased confidence and feelings of well-being and enhance the possibility of living a more creative and fulfilling life.

Over the many years that I have been working, I have worked with people who seek me out with a wide variety of troubling matters. These have included depression, anxiety, bereavement and loss, sexual difficulties and confusions; sexual, emotional, psychological and physical abuse; self-harm, eating disorders, migration, loss, PTSD, Complex trauma including Holocaust trauma and Intergenerational trauma. Sometimes people seek me out because although on the surface everything looks fine, deep down they have a feeling that something is not right, or their lives feel meaningless. My experience is that whatever the named issues that people bring, they feel profoundly and painfully alone with themselves and their troubles.

The importance of relationship and connection

Jung believed that we become who we are through relationships with others. A Jungian approach to mental health and well-being considers the social and cultural context into which people are born, grow up and live.

This includes their intergenerational inheritances. Jungian analysts are highly trained to work at depth and are required during training to undergo their own analysis over many years in order to understand their own unconscious experience.