| Dr Peter Ellingsen BA, MSc, PhD. |
‘What I think we are doing in analysis is to enable the people who come to us to increase their feeling of freedom … to liberate the forces which are present in themselves to enjoy life, not as scared people looking for all sorts of safety, nor as repenting sinners … .’ Andre Green |
As a registered practising psychoanalyst (ACP), I work with the deep sources of distress and dissatisfaction. These can be felt as conditions like depression and anxiety, or manifest as a feeling of hopelessness, or an endless struggle to think well of oneself. Psychoanalysis is a way that such unhappiness, and its more troubling mental triggers, can be treated. It happens by speaking in such a way that actual subjectivity is discovered, freeing up the individual to explore hitherto hidden sources of creativity. Psychoanalysis is an avenue through which we might create a love of new beginnings. Known as the Talking Cure, it opens up, rather than closes down, what we might be. It is a way, you might say, to treat what ails us.
There are innumerable ways of recounting a life, and a childhood that may seem like a fraught love affair. Uniquely, psychoanalysis takes us to the core of how these accounts – and the consequences they have – are told and retold. It is a cure that allows other spaces to arise, owes nothing to conformity and risks finding out the true desire of the person seeking treatment.
If you are looking for a therapy that goes to the heart of what it means to be a human being, or if you are just curious, feel free to peruse this website and the writing it contains. Like psychoanalysis itself, this is a place to explore. It abounds with ideas, but its possibilities are not exhausted by thinking which, on its own, solves none of the riddles of mental pain.
