Psychodynamic approach has been developed on the ground of achievements of contemporary psychiatry and acknowledged psychoanalytical concepts. Psychoanalytical paradigm postulates that understanding of mental life requires reflection on the unconscious. The life of a person is driven by unconscious mechanisms of acting, inner conflicts, desires, needs, ways of interpreting social reality and patterns of interpersonal relations. The key to the unconscious are dreams, neurotic symptoms, slips of the tongue and unconscious ways of building and experiencing relations with other people, and thus with a psychotherapist, acquired during childhood.
Psychodynamic therapy unfolds on the foundation of a therapeutic relation, a bond which develops between a patient and a therapist during the treatment. The session goes on „face to face”. Partakers have eye contact, which is conductive to building a relation. The patient is encouraged to freely share thoughts, associations, feelings. The therapist sets hypotheses concerning mental life of the patient, having regard to the content brought up by the patient during the session, biographical data and the dynamics of the therapeutic relation.
It is particularly important for a psychodynamic therapist to analyse the phenomenon of transference, an unconscious process within which feelings, expectations, attitudes the patient experienced in relation to significant people in the past are directed to the therapist and other people around.
Therapeutic work aims at providing the patient with new understanding of his/her inner and outer reality, thus enabling him/her to live through the interpersonal experience within the therapeutic relation, which sets the foundation to implement beneficial changes in mental and social functioning.
[from kcp.com.pl, my translation]