Weill Cornell Physicians

Psychotherapy/Payne Whitney Manhattan

The Psychotherapy Practice of the Department of Psychiatry at Payne Whitney-Manhattan focuses on using forms of psychotherapy as a mode of treatment for psychiatric illnesses and disorders. These varying forms include psychoanalysis, cognitive behavioral psychotherapy, and psychodynamic psychotherapy.

As a therapy, psychoanalysis is based on the observation that individuals are often unaware of many of the factors that determine their emotions and behavior. Psychoanalytic treatment demonstrates how unconscious factors affect current relationships and patterns of behavior, and helps the individual to deal better with the realities of adult life.

Analysis is an intimate partnership, in the course of which the patient becomes aware of the underlying sources of his or her difficulties not simply intellectually, but emotionally - by re-experiencing them with the analyst. Typically, the patient comes four or five times a week, lies on a couch, and attempts to say everything that comes to mind. These conditions create the analytic setting, which permits the emergence of aspects of the mind not accessible to other methods of observation. As the patient speaks, hints of the unconscious sources of current difficulties gradually begin to appear - in certain repetitive patterns of behavior, in the subjects which the patient finds hard to talk about, in the ways the patient relates to the analyst.

The analyst helps elucidate these for the patient, who refines, corrects, rejects, and adds further thoughts and feelings. During the years that an analysis takes place, the patient wrestles with these insights, going over them again and again with the analyst and experiencing them in daily life, in fantasies, and in dreams. Patient and analyst join in efforts not only to modify crippling life patterns and remove incapacitating symptoms, but also to expand the freedom to work and to love. Eventually the patient's life - his or her behavior, relationships, sense of self - changes in deep and abiding ways.

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