The first three to five sessions are for getting to know each other. In the first, I will ask what brings you. After that, I ask you to say whatever comes to mind, in whatever order it comes. This is how every session works from then on.

This gives you a first taste of what psychoanalytic psychotherapy feels like from the inside, and whether it suits you. You are under no obligation to continue. It gives me a first understanding of your inner workings, and of how the work should be set up to help you most.

At the end of these sessions we agree how often we meet. We do not agree how long for: the work is open-ended, and we decide together, as we go, when it feels right to stop.

People often ask this a few sessions in, once the most pressing things have been said. Come anyway. These often turn out to be the most useful sessions.

When nothing urgent is pulling at you, there is room to look underneath. Instead of reporting on the week, you can start to see what keeps producing it, and the connections that are hard to notice while you are busy coping. There is no need to prepare a topic. Start with whatever is there, even if it is “I don’t know what to say”.

No. The session is where the seed is planted: something gets noticed, or said out loud for the first time. Most of the growing happens after you leave. A thought comes back on the way home. A familiar situation looks slightly different on Thursday.

That is why the time between sessions matters as much as the hour itself, and why regular sessions help: each one picks up what has been moving in the meantime.

In psychoanalysis this is called the frame: the same day, the same time and the same length, every week. A session runs for exactly fifty minutes, not five minutes less and not five minutes more.

The frame gives the work firm edges. When you know exactly when and how the next session will happen, nothing about the arrangement needs your attention, and outside disturbances are kept to a minimum. That predictability lets the mind settle, and it is what allows the unconscious to come into the work.

This is why I hold firmly to the agreed day and time. The steadiness is not a formality. It is what makes the work inside it possible.

Sometimes, yes. Meeting every other week is better than not meeting at all, but the work moves more slowly and takes longer, because more of each hour goes on catching up.

How often we meet is not a rule applied to everyone. It depends on what you want to work through, and we decide it together in the first few sessions: for some people that is once a week, for others twice. As the work goes on, there will be times to review it, including whether to meet more or less often.

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is long-term work. For most people that means somewhere between one and three years, sometimes longer. I cannot give you a date at the start, and I would be wary of anyone who could.

Nothing is imposed. There is no contract for six months or five years, and you are free to stop whenever you choose. I ask one thing: if the wish to stop comes up, bring it to a session. It often means something difficult and important is at work, and it is worth talking about before you decide.

When we both feel the work is done, we take a few sessions to prepare for the ending, and then we part.

Coaching works towards stated goals. CBT works on identified thoughts and behaviours with defined protocols. Both are bounded and both can be useful.

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy does not begin from a goal or a protocol. It attends to what you did not intend to say, what repeats, and what you have arranged your life to avoid knowing. There are no exercises and no plan.

A warm manner is not enough. Ask whether they are in their own therapy and whether their work is supervised. I do both.

My own therapy means I know this work from the patient’s chair, and my blind spots are dealt with there rather than brought into your sessions. Supervision means every case is regularly reviewed with a senior psychoanalyst, so your treatment never rests on one person’s view. Without either, a therapist’s own unresolved reactions can quietly shape the work, and no one is in a position to notice.