What our difficulties are about

Daseinsanalysis brings together psychoanalysis and a philosophical curiosity about what it is to be a person at all. It starts from the thought that our difficulties are not simply faults to be corrected. They are, among other things, our way of registering certain facts of life that are hard to bear: that we depend on other people, that we don’t know what will happen, that we have to choose, that we are vulnerable, that we lose what we love.

Your own history matters, of course: the relationships you have known, what has happened to you, how you learned to protect yourself. But sometimes a quite ordinary situation, a disagreement, a separation, a decision, unsettles us far more than it seems it should, and the interesting question is why. Therapy is a way of taking that question seriously without assuming we already know the answer. There is room for dreams, for odd or unsettling fantasies, for anxiety and shame, and for the thoughts one would normally keep to oneself.