What is psychoanalytic therapy?
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy helps uncover how past experiences and unconscious patterns continue to influence your relationships, emotions, and daily life. Through consistent sessions, we explore the roots of recurring struggles and develop a deeper understanding of yourself, allowing for greater clarity, flexibility, and meaningful change.
Rather than treating a symptom in isolation, we get curious about what the symptom is doing for you: what it protects, and what it keeps repeating. Relationships that keep ending the same way, or a flatness that shows up just when life is going well, usually have a history, and that history can be understood.
How is this different from weekly therapy?
Continuity, mostly. A weekly session often spends its first stretch catching up on the seven days since the last one. At two to three sessions per week, there is less summarizing and more room for the work itself: a thought can stay unfinished on Tuesday and be picked up Thursday, and deeper material surfaces because it has somewhere reliable to land.
The frequency also changes what we can use. Patterns show up faster at this pace, including between you and me, in the room. The way you relate to your therapist often mirrors the way you relate everywhere else, and here we can watch that happen and work with it directly, rather than only discussing it in the abstract.
Who is psychoanalytic therapy for?
People who keep running into the same patterns despite real effort to change them. Meeting this often allows deeper exploration and more substantial, lasting change in areas such as self-esteem, relationships, sexuality, and mood. Many of the clients who choose this work have already done good weekly therapy and sensed its limits: they understand their patterns well and still cannot stop repeating them.
Curiosity matters more than crisis here. This is a poor fit for an acute emergency, and a strong fit for the question why do I keep doing this?
What happens in a session?
You talk about whatever is actually on your mind, not what seems like proper therapy material: a dream, an email you rewrote four times before sending, a moment of irritation that embarrassed you. I listen for the patterns underneath and say what I notice, and over time the connections between past and present become clearer. I also look for the silent, non-verbal aspects of how you communicate your experience, and how these impact your relationships, family dynamics, and life choices.
How long does psychoanalytic therapy last?
Longer than most therapy, and it is open-ended on purpose. Patterns built over decades rarely change in twelve sessions, and I would rather be upfront about that. Most people work this way for a year at least, often longer. We review how it is going as we go, and when the time comes, ending is treated as part of the treatment itself, discussed and planned rather than left to drift.
How much does it cost? What about insurance?
Sessions are $180 each. Please note that I do not accept insurance for psychoanalytic treatment, sessions take place 2-3 times per week, and sliding scale options are not available for this work. That makes this a real financial commitment. If you have questions about payment, reach out to discuss them in your free consultation.
Where do sessions take place?
At my office at 1330 N Logan St in Denver's Capitol Hill neighborhood, near Uptown and North Capitol Hill, a practical detail that matters more at this frequency than most. Online sessions are possible for clients elsewhere in Colorado, and many people mix the two across a week.