Psychosomatics

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Sometimes we know nothing of our own distress because we cut ourselves off to avoid intolerable suffering. But in so doing, we also deprive ourselves of the emotional and imaginary dimensions of life. Although defense mechanisms (such as denial or dissociation) have allowed to survive and adapt to past painful situations, they sooner or later become obstacles to one's development, barring access to relational and affective ressources.

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In this context, it is the body that registers what the psyche has not been able to make sense of. The body may become the theater of either a "functional" disorder (sleep disorders, migraines, digestive pains, skin problems) or an "organic" pathology with actual lesions. In other cases, an addiction or chronic pain may be masking a long-standing depression that has not been fully felt and is still waiting to be experienced. Sometimes, an accident, burn-out, or a situation of harassment may bring to light an old trauma.

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Therapeutic work will then consist in making the body present in sessions, through "body" mediations (relaxation exercises, visualization, tonic or sensory energization), dream work, or art mediations (drawing, collage, etc.). The aim is to become attentive to what is happening in the body, so as to bring out feelings and memories, as well as a whole corporeal imaginary, from which the patient can reappropriate his or her experience and rebuild links between emotion and representation, past and present, memory and actuality, soma and psyche.

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Supportive therapy

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An event on the side of loss (break-up, bereavement, job loss, illness, etc.) can cause us to falter, reactivating older wounds. Everyday life is then impeded. In this context, supportive psychotherapy aims to accompany the individual through this difficult transition by energizing existing subjective resources or by building new ones.

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The first step is to support the expression of emotions, their connection and elaboration, so that the patient accepts his or her vulnerability without judgment, develops greater tolerance towards so-called "negative" affects—sadness, anger, fear or anxiety—and can also express his or her needs (for rest, recognition, affection) in a more assertive way to family, friends or colleagues. Therapy also offers a time and a place to find a better balance between the person's internal world and the sometimes very demanding external environment.

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Psychotherapy aims to restore or strengthen the person's sense of self, enabling him or her to apprehend reality with greater discernment, become more assertive and autonomous, make better use of environmental supports and develop healthier, more lively relationships. More broadly, psychotherapy aims to develop the persons’ capacity for expression, invention and creation, enabling them to change their point of view about themselves, but also about their own history and about their future. Psychotherapy can be the starting point for psychoanalysis.

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Psychoanalysis

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Entering analysis means developing a new relationship with the unknown that resides in oneself and in others. It is this alliance with the unconscious that enables patients to gradually deconstruct psychic hindrance: limiting beliefs and fixations, repetitions and avoidance, feelings of guilt and submissiveness, fixed identities or alienating identifications, unconscious loyalties and contracts, and so on.

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When these mechanisms are brought to light in the therapeutic relationship, the "frozen"parts of the patient are put back into circulation and reconnected with the rest of the psyche through a process of integration. Armed with this new-found psychic energy, patients can accept their own responsibility for what affects them.

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Psychoanalysis aims at a subjective reorganization capable of sustaining a renewed and creative relationship with oneself, with others and with the world. It enables patients to re-engage with themselves and to become more fully human, no longer on the side of power, and control, but on the side of openness and consent to becoming.