I came to psychoanalysis through philosophy — more precisely, through the question of why we are so often strangers to ourselves. Both disciplines take the same observation seriously: that between what we know about ourselves and what actually moves us, there is a gap. Psychoanalysis is the attempt to work within that gap rather than paper over it. A considerable part of what we feel, want and repeat is not directly accessible – not by accident, but because it once had good reasons to become inaccessible – and it returns later: as a symptom, as a relationship pattern, as an exhaustion that the circumstances alone cannot explain.

In this understanding, symptoms are more than malfunctions to be removed: they are attempted solutions. The best answer a person could find to an inner conflict as long as no better one was available. Whoever removes only the symptom leaves behind the conflict it stood in for. Treatment, to me, therefore means understanding together what the symptom is a solution for — and, within the safety of a reliable therapeutic relationship, making a better one possible. A relationship in which old patterns are not merely talked about but experienced and changed as they occur; that is why analytic work takes time. Time for one’s own complexity: not a luxury — a standard of care.