I work primarily from a contemporary psychodynamic perspective that draws on a mixture of principles stemming from psychoanalytic perspectives on both human development and the psychotherapeutic process itself.

What exactly does that mean? Here are several links to articles, all by Jonathan Shedler, Ph.D., that nicely summarize what a contemporary psychodynamic/psychoanalytic way of working clinically “looks like,” as well as reviewing the empirical support for psychodynamic psychotherapy.

Shedler, J. (2010) The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy. American Psychologist, 65 (2), 98-109.

Shedler, J. (2006) That was then, this is now: An introduction to contemporary psychodynamic psychotherapy. Unpublished manuscript.

Shedler, J. (2010) Getting to know me: What's behind psychoanalysis. Scientific American: Mind, November/December issue.

I like very much how Hephzibah Rendle-Short, a British psychoanalyst, delineated her way of conceptualizing the psychotherapy process that resonates with my own view of how I try to be helpful to people I am working with in psychotherapy:

“Distress and suffering is often linked to particular events and significant people that are tangled up in our memories. Some of this is conscious, some not. Talking to another who is able to listen is a way to not only untangle such memories and the accompanying hidden feelings and thoughts but also to make unexpected links. In remembering … gaps … holes … contradictions … fragments … will appear. By giving weight to these … by wondering about them … a possibility may slowly emerge in which a new narrative about what has happened in a life can be stitched.

Each person will come because of their own very personal reason, or set of reasons, experienced as a dis-ordering of the smooth running of life. Talking can produce both relief and insight, which is why this process came to be known as the ‘talking cure’. Talking about lived distress requires wondering about the details of life that have become disturbing. The very process of drawing such disturbances into the light through language can have a transformative power to produce psychological change in daily life.

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy does not offer off the peg solutions or advice. Rather it offers a space for you to make a solution of your own out of your own history by linking the tangles from the past and the present to contemplate a different future.”