The Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research

What Is Psychoanalysis?

Psychoanalysis is a modern, effective treatment for healing emotional pain and promoting personal growth. Here are a few of the many problems psychoanalysts can help:

  • anxiety
  • depression
  • low self-esteem
  • repeated disappointments or difficulties in intimate relationships
  • sexual problems
  • lack of success at work
  • trouble with anger
  • indecision and emotional paralysis
  • diminished capacity for pleasure
  • creative "blocks"

Psychoanalysis is based on the principle that many factors guiding a person's feelings, thinking, and action remain outside his or her conscious awareness. These unconscious emotional processes influence one's current relationships, work life, sense of self, and ability to feel pleasure.

Together the patient and the analyst embark on a detailed exploration of the patient's inner life. Through the relationship with the analyst, one grows more aware of how one feels and interacts in other relationships. Patterns of feeling, thinking and acting that have developed over years are re-experienced emotionally and understood. By bringing to light the way one feels and related to others, the choices one has made, and the reasons for these choices, psychoanalysis frees a person to see new ways of reaching his or her goals, and opens the way to more satisfying relationships and pursuits.

Born of Freud's discoveries about the human mind, psychoanalysis has evolved into a contemporary and relevant therapy. Enriched with extensive new developments in psychoanalytic understanding and technique since its origins a century ago, for many, it is the treatment of choice.

Since its establishment in 1945, The Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research has provided psychoanalytic treatment to people in the greater metropolitan area. As part of the Department of Psychiatry of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, the Center is an integral part of the scientific environment enriched by experts from the biological, psychological, and social sciences.

For further information about our Center, including information about consultations training programs, please contact us.

Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research site