Psychoanalytic orientation
What is it?
I see adults and young people for consultation, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in London Bridge. Whether you are interested in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, or autism support, I orient the work by the individual difficulties of each person I work with.
Generally speaking the work takes place through an open and confidential conversation. What distinguishes psychoanalytic orientation from many other therapeutic orientations, is that the work goes beyond the clinical level of diagnostic categories and treatment plans that aim to merely modify behaviour.
Instead the aim is to articulate, beyond these general categories, what it exactly is that is not working for the person who comes to consult me, and in such way target new solutions for each individual separately.
This does not mean that I work without clinical know-how and training. I am also accustomed in working together with other clinicians from other disciplines when necessary.Why Lacanian psychoanalysis?
Psychoanalysis is a discipline for a specific kind of listening of a subject who comes to speak to a psychoanalyst. Contemporary psychoanalysis continues to orient therapeutic work in relation to the idea or concept of the unconscious.
For the Lacanian orientation the target of interpretation is the speaking body which has come to replace the idea of the unconscious and its truth effects. It is a clinic sensitive to variety of bodies and different body phenomena, aiming to touch the contingent level of what we try to capture with the term jouissance.
In this psychoanalytic orientation, which follows the very last teaching of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, we move from the generality of clinical symptoms and their diagnostic reading to the sinthome as the embodiment of what is singular for each individual.
Logically speaking, this singularity of the sinthome comes to oppose the pathological generality of the unconscious, lodged in the Other. This radically alters how and what one listens to, and further what is read within what becomes said, when somebody comes to consult you.
But in the psychoanalytic framework the reference to the unconscious remains, even if as nothing but a supposition of a knowledge and the belief that this supposition already has effects.
This means that there is an idea that we may know something about how we are caught up within those discourses through which we aim to make some sense of our lives, regulate our bodies and their enjoyment.
But it also means that through psychoanalytically oriented work it is possible to construct something of such capture.
Furthermore, the work aims towards that which escapes common sense but, nevertheless, intimately touches us.
It means that in Lacanian psychoanalysis we retain the possibility to say something singular about how we experience ourselves, our bodies and their symptoms, things that cause us suffering and enjoyment, pleasure or anxiety – in order to construct something beyond common ways of speaking. This way it becomes possible to modify something at the subjective level of experience, and take responsibility of our own jouissance – not merely fight against it.
One can say that psychoanalytically oriented work begins, in each case, from a supposition that the person seeking to speak to an analyst already knows something about that which is beyond what they think that they know.
What is at stake in the psychoanalytic work is the access to such knowing. This access requires that one consults another coming from the psychoanalytic experience and makes the effort to say something about that which disturbs, is bizarre or even utterly ridiculous.
Only in such way can one extract something that is not given a meaning by anyone else. And be surprised along the way, in order to invent something new – even if only to find some laughter in the fixity of the ways we tend to seek our satisfaction.Who is it for?
I work with anyone who wants to know more about why things are not working in their life. Or perhaps things work too well and that has become unbearable. I accommodate all the ordinary difficulties that relate to work or studies and consult people with problems that tend to involve other people, such as difficulties in love or family life.
Outside typical private and institutional therapies, I am experienced in working with people who have suffered institutional and structural violence or police repression, and have supported individuals before and after incarceration.
I work with variety of mood and affective disorders, and am experienced in working with individuals who are formally diagnosed with a personality disorder, OCD, PTSD, anxiety or depression. I also have a particular interest and experience in working with neurodevelopmental difficulties such as ADD, ADHD or autism, and supporting people with learning disabilities and selective mutism.
I am accustomed with variety of trauma, sensitive therapeutic approach with complex PTSD, different kinds of eating related symptoms, PMDD related cyclic struggle, and complexities of sex, gender and sexuality. I also have worked with addictive behaviours, in relation to drugs, alcohol and sex.
But in order to work psychoanalytically you do not need to specify your difficulties by any given or above mentioned discourse. I see people whose most intimate questions concern mainly the madness that is life in general.