The School of Life produced this illuminating introduction to How Psychotherapy Works. The Irish Council for Psychotherapy has a number of explainer videos on their website, as does the Association for Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy in Ireland.
There are forms of psychotherapy that offer mental health counselling, life coaching and emotional support – others that address the status quo with a pragmatic, psychological approach – and there are types of psychotherapy for which how-to guides & self-help skills do not apply. See FAQs for different schools of thought and differences in psychotherapy treatment.
Psychoanalytic clinicians are formally trained in Freudian and Lacanian Psychoanalysis over many years, yet it is the emergent experience of personal analysis that determines a Psychoanalyst’s practice. This is an intensely intimate experience that resists generalisation. Diagnosis and prescription have no place here. This is a speech and language clinic of a different order, where the guiding principle is that the human condition necessitates speaking.
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy works from a practice position that formations of the subject’s unconscious emerge through the spoken word. The analytic practitioner listens attentively to the letter of the word. The experience of being listened to in this manner is singular to Psychoanalysis. It is an experience like no Other and that is what sets this clinical talking treatment apart from other talk therapies