Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy: Technique

This article describes the technique of psychoanalysis and its modified version, psychoanalytic psychotherapy. In describing the central goal of helping people in emotional pain, emphasis is placed on making the unconscious conscious, and in that way allowing a person to have greater understanding of how her/his mind works, and therefore greater control of her/his thinking processes and emotions. The article describes the way the psychoanalyst listens to the person in analysis, and intervenes using specific ways of interacting: confrontation, clarification, and interpretation.