What is Psychodynamic Therapy?
Updated: 7 days ago
What is psychodynamic therapy?
There is no single, universally accepted definition of psychodynamic therapy. Therapists differ in their understanding, practice, and which aspects they emphasise. Rather than offering one definitive explanation, I'll describe seven features that distinguish my approach and how they can help alleviate psychic or emotional suffering.
1. Exploring Recurring Themes and Patterns
Psychodynamic therapy can help you recognise recurring patterns in your feelings, thoughts, and relationships—patterns that often trace back to your early family experiences.
For example, a person may be drawn to romantic relationships with partners who struggle with addiction. They may find themselves frequently preoccupied with managing crises and worrying about relapse. Exploring their past may reveal that they grew up caring for a younger sibling with alcoholism and the fear that sibling might die.
That role may have been painful, especially if the sibling received more attention from their parents while their own needs went unnoticed and unmet.
However, being a caregiver may also have felt meaningful and given them a sense of purpose and responsibility. As a result, in adult romantic relationships, even if they resent having to put out fires or feel that their partner is unresponsive to their needs, they may still feel valued because someone depends on them. Their identity may have been built around it to the point that caring and feeling needed are closely tied to feeling lovable.
Understanding how a pattern develops can help you see that, while it once served a protective function, it may now do more harm than good. This newfound awareness can create an opportunity to make new choices that feel more purposeful and independent.
2. Deepening Emotional Experience
This is where psychodynamic therapy's emphasis on exploring and identifying emotions, and learning to feel them in the body, comes into play. As we work together, I'll encourage you to express your feelings, both current and past, with as little censorship as possible. This can take time, practice, and a great deal of trust.
But therapy is also a place where you can fully feel and safely share all your feelings. With time, you may come to realise that feelings you once believed to be overwhelming or intolerable are, in fact, not only acceptable but survivable, both to yourself and other people.
3. Discovering Why We Avoid Difficult Feelings
Things we did in childhood—the defences we developed—to cope with painful or threatening feelings don't always serve us well as adults.
You may have learned that some feelings are unacceptable or that you don't have the right to express them. Let's say that expressing anger to a parent when you were younger may have led to being dismissed, shamed, or abused. That can make verbalising in therapy feel risky.
4. Getting to Know the Parts of Yourself You Don't See
We all have emotional "blind spots"—parts of ourselves that are difficult to recognise because they clash with our ideal self, how we'd like to see ourselves. Sometimes we suppress a feeling or behaviour so thoroughly that it appears in the opposite form. Here's a good example because it can be a real challenge for the best of us:
Let's say you don't recognise the part of yourself that wants to be right and "win" arguments. Or you may be so eager to please that you stay quiet out of fear that asserting yourself will upset others or lead to rejection. Simply acknowledging these parts of yourself can result in feelings of shame or discomfort.
Therapy gives you space to approach these things with curiosity rather than judgement. They can then live in harmony with the parts of yourself you are already aware of and contribute to a fuller, more integrated understanding of yourself.
5. Exploring How Past Trauma Shapes Who We Are
Difficult or traumatic experiences, particularly in early relationships, can shape how you respond to emotions and relate to others. Trauma may leave you numb or disconnected. It may also lead you to appease others to avoid hostility or retaliation, even when doing so means compromising your own values.
These ways of handling troublesome situations may have genuinely helped you, maybe even become essential to your safety. But are they still helping you now, or have they outlived their purpose?
Psychodynamic therapy encourages you to explore how these coping mechanisms developed with understanding, self-compassion, and without blame. Recognising their origins and re-evaluating their present costs can help you develop a greater sense of safety and, over time, more trust and emotional closeness with others.
6. Learning to Build Ego Strength
Another essential focus of psychodynamic therapy is what psychologists refer to as strengthening the ego—developing the part of us that supports a stable sense of self and helps us successfully weather challenges, criticism, and failure.
Harsh or shaming experiences early in life can shift the ego into an internal critic, a destructive superego that distorts how you feel about yourself and undermines your confidence. The term "negative self-talk" is a perfect description of this sometimes-sadistic inner saboteur, especially when it tries to bully you into feeling shameful and inadequate.
Therapy helps you recognise that voice, understand where it came from and, most importantly, challenge its authority. Over time, as you begin to realise your value as a person isn't contingent on anyone else's validation or approval, especially not that inner critic, you'll begin to build a stronger, more resilient sense of self.
7. Understanding the Patterns That Shape Your Personality
A final distinguishing feature of psychodynamic therapy is its emphasis on personality and personality structure, not just symptoms. These enduring patterns shape how you experience yourself, manage emotions, and relate to others. They're profound enough to deserve a closer look in a separate article.
Ultimately, psychodynamic therapy is all about understanding yourself more deeply so you can make choices about how you want to live, rather than remaining bound by patterns you may not even realise are there.
This article was last updated on the 16th October, 2026
Jake Freedman is a psychodynamic therapist working in Fitzrovia, Central London. His main areas of experience and interest are in states of depersonalisation and derealisation, relational trauma, and trauma-related dissociation.
Kathryn Levison is a psychoanalytically-informed freelance writer/editor with a focus on psychology and human nature.
Key Sources:
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Kernberg, O. F. (1984). Severe Personality Disorders: Psychotherapeutic Strategies. Yale University Press.
Leichsenring, F., Steinert, C., Rabung, S. and Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2022). The efficacy of psychotherapies and pharmacotherapies for mental disorders in adults: An umbrella review and meta-analytic evaluation of recent meta-analyses. World Psychiatry, 21(1), 133–145.
Shedler, J. (2010). The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy. American Psychologist, 65(2), 98–109.
Terry, P. (2023). A Clinician’s Guide to Understanding and Using Psychoanalysis in Practice. Routledge.
