05/20/2024
Psychodynamic therapy is a broad category encompassing both psychoanalysis and several models of psychotherapy that are informed by psychoanalytic theory but utilize non-analytical methods. Psychodynamic models posit an unconscious component of the psyche that shares a complex, interdependent relationship with the conscious mind, and the goal of treatment typically involves the delivery of unconscious material into conscious experience (i.e., insight). After its inception with Freud at the turn of the 20th century, psychoanalytic theory began evolving among many disparate lineages in Europe and the Americas, with contemporary analysts continuing to refine their models today (e.g., American relational psychoanalysis).
One theme that has tied together several of the psychodynamic lineages informing my own work is the notion of the intrinsic multiplicity of the self. Although Freud’s own model does divide the personality into three distinct components (id-ego-superego), Carl Jung was likely the first psychodynamic theorist to describe the self as a robust multiplicity. In his model, the individual psyche arises from a primordial well of inherited psychological elements, known as archetypes, each of which is prone to expression through its own idiosyncratic style of affect, impulse, and symbolism. The integration of these archetypal energies into the client’s conscious life is the ultimate goal of Jungian analysis.
A less overt sort of multiplicity appeared again in the British object relations school, which is most commonly associated with Melanie Klein. Within this line of thought, the multiple parts of the psyche are not inherited, but form very early in life through the internalization of external attachment figures. Philip Bromberg later refined this model with his more explicitly multiple concept of self-states, proposing that therapeutic growth occurs when clients integrate their many self-states into a more seamlessly continuous felt sense of self. Outside of psychoanalysis, this theme has also shown up prominently in Richard Schwartz’s psychodynamically influenced Internal Family Systems model (IFS).
