As a psychoanalyst, my focus is to attune to the emergent, yet hidden process that is active within us all. The work is a creative process, designed to foster a new consciousness. From this new vantage point, personal issues, dilemmas, negative patterns, emotional states or problematic patterns, are seen in a new light, understood for what they have to teach, and thereby resolved. As old issues are resolved, new issues are revealed. The process is ongoing and aims toward a further refinement of one’s being.
To achieve this creation of consciousness, and to penetrate to the core of any existing or emerging issues (or teachings), I employ several modalities. Each of these modalities serves to reach beyond the bounds of one’s current awareness, and into the hidden depths of the psyche. From these depths, the new consciousness will evolve.
Self-Oriented psychotherapy focuses upon what is required and being asked of us, by the greater Self.
As the Swiss Psychologist, Carl Jung discovered, there are two centres to the psyche. There is the ego, of which we are all familiar with and call ‘I’, and there is also the greater Self, which remains largely unknown, and operates at a level beyond our awareness.
Like an evolutionary drive, the Self seeks a greater conscious. The ego has the capacity to meet this aspiration, but needs to be prompted to do so.
Ideally the ego is aligned and attentive to the demands of the Self. When it is not, the Self will constellate whatever mental state or physical circumstance is required to garner the attention of the ego and draw it back into alignment with itself. This realignment may be approached willingly or unwillingly. Where we honour the demands of the Self, our process unfolds harmoniously. Where we ignore the Self, it becomes more troublesome and forceful.
Self-Oriented psychotherapy is designed to attune the individual to the demands of their deeper Self, and accept its guidance.