Background

Bare with me as this may get technical and even quite boring at times.....

In preparation for being a fully licensed mental health professional, grad students complete traineeships/practicums/internships....whatever they are called (depending on the graduate degree you are seeking) in order to "practice" the craft while supervised by an already licensed practitioner.  

In these practice settings you are at the mercy of the theoretical orientation your supervisor practices themselves in their own clinical practices and this can range from cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), narrative therapy, person-centered therapy, existential therapy, systems theory, and on and on and on.  

I was trained in the theoretical orientation known as psychodynamic.  This came forth out of psychoanalysis, in which Freud and his predecessors are the theorists taught and their techniques are followed, though the frequency of meetings is not as often as 5x/week. Psychodynamic theory focuses on the transference relationship between the therapist and patient with the expectation that the patient will "re-enact" early childhood dynamics they experienced with their primary caregivers in the therapy room in a repetition-compulsion type behavior in hopes of working through unresolved early conflicts.  This is believed to happen throughout all relationships (both in and out of therapy) of the patient but in the therapy room, the dynamic can be processed and understood.


There are no accidents in the therapy room.  Every action, every inaction, every slip of the tongue, every bat of an eyelash, every switching of sitting position, everything that is/isn't said, every yawn, every instance of "forgetting", EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN is grist for the meal and analyzed for the sake of understanding the underlying meaning for it did/didn't happen.

All of this leads to the discussion of familiar patterns in the patient's life where these very same behaviors are occurring, again, in order to "work through" the meaning behind them and what purpose they serve.



That in a nutshell is psychodynamic work.  I could go on and on about this, but then again, I am not attempting to write a dissertation here.