Psychoanalysis is now more than 125 years old, but fortunately, it has not stood still. Since Freud’s initial discoveries, the field has undergone a great deal of revision by numerous thinkers who have left their mark. Today, psychoanalytic psychotherapy is a contemporary practice that looks at the human mind through a radically updated lens, shifting…

In the first chapter, we looked at how psychoanalytic psychotherapy works as a technique that unravels. We explored how our symptoms are actually rigid constructions—meanings and connections we’ve frozen in place to help us cope with a complex reality, until those very connections start causing us to suffer. If healing means breaking down these fixed…