This form of therapy focuses on how the unconscious mind impacts thoughts and behaviors, and therapy involves reviewing early childhood experiences to learn how these events may have shaped the client and how they contribute to current behaviors. The purpose of psychoanalytic techniques is to make the unconscious conscious.

Techniques:

1. Analysis of resistance and defenses - interpreting how the patient avoids or manages pain is key to psychoanalytic therapy. Pointing out any behaviors the patient uses to resist exploring specific issues or therapy in general (i.e. silence, lateness, deflecting) assists the patient in gaining insight about these issues.

2. Dream analysis and interpretation - Freud considered analysis of dreams to be the pathway to the unconscious. Examining dreams assists in discovering psychic content (latent ideas full of repressed drives and emotions within the unconscious mind).

3. Transference - this naturally occurs when the client responds to the therapist as though he/or she were someone significant from the client's past (i.e. a parent). Working through the memories, attitudes, motives, perceptions feelings, fantasies, or other issues in the here-and-now gives the client a new experience.

4. Free association - this method is engaged by encouraging the client to talk about whatever comes to mind as the therapist reads a list of words (i.e. father, school). Through this process, repressed memory fragments are to emerge unless the client has resistance. However, resistance may be evidence there is important information requiring further probing.