This is the second installment in my video series about what to expect in psychodynamic psychotherapy, focusing on what happens during the early weeks.

In addition to developing a deeper understanding of the client’s past and current emotional issues, these sessions involve a fair amount of education about the process itself: how it is the job of the psychotherapist to make the unconscious conscious; encouraging clients to begin thinking of themselves as a collection of parts, more or less like distinct individuals cohabiting and relating to one another; and explaining what kind of change is possible and how it occurs.