JEREMY SOH, PH.D.

Psychoanalysis is a form of psychological treatment for mental and emotional disturbance that aims to produce deep and lasting personal change by effecting transformations on the structural level of the psyche. It may be considered a specific form of psychotherapy, one that focuses on bringing to light repressed or unconscious sources of conflict, to promote a wellness that is more fundamental than just symptom relief or healing.

Psychoanalysis values the singularity of a person's experience and upholds it as the crux of treatment. It follows Freud’s original insight that our words and the ways we employ them are structured just as much by memory and society as by grammar, whence the famous adage “the unconscious is structured like a language.” In this view, there is no sensible experience without language, since speaking, being and relating are virtually identical. More than a medium of communication, language is explicative of the way we form, define, position and locate ourselves in the world. Like our voices, our words are manifest contents of deeper things that rarely resemble the significations they seem to carry. Hence they also function as passageways to the deep seated conflicts and tensions lying at the basis of our more visible or apparent symptoms. 

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Psychoanalysis thus attends closely to the intricacies of speech as the guide and lever of treatment, in place of predetermined clinical models such as those found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The articulations of speech are taken as core material of the clinic, singular to each person and irreducible to nothing, including psychoanalytic theory itself.

What You Can Expect From Analytic Treatment

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Personal psychoanalysis is typically undertaken several times per week, each session lasting forty-five to fifty minutes. This does not however constitute a mandatory rule. Analytic treatment draws its power from its flexibility and variability. What it provides is the most generous room for you to speak, to be listened to, and to be supported in bringing to light patterns of speech, relations, and behaviors in your life that usually escape attention and are not even detected or identified in normal behavior outside the clinic. 

A distinctive characteristic of Lacanian technique I employ is the "variable length" session, wherein the time frame may shorten depending on what occurs in the session or a particular moment of significance. One purpose of the variable length session is to prevent routinization of treatment and forms of dependence that can develop when "clock time" is blindly obeyed. By making time subjective, a variable frame facilitates the progress of treatment by pinpointing and punctuating unconscious processes, driving it forward in focused and effective manner.