If you’re thinking about starting psychotherapy, you may be hoping not only to understand yourself better, but also to feel differently in your day-to-day life. You might be sensing something painful or confusing inside you, but struggle to put it into words. Modern psychoanalysis was built to help with exactly this kind of experience.
Contemporary psychoanalytic therapists understand that the deepest emotional shifts often cannot be achieved through words alone. Instead, psychoanalysis works through something lived, felt, and shared between patient and therapist. To understand how we arrived at this modern view, it helps to briefly look at where psychoanalysis started — and how it has evolved.
What Traditional Psychoanalysis Believed
In early psychoanalysis, therapists were trained to be neutral and distant. Freud (1912) famously wrote that the analyst should be “opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him” (p. 113). The idea was that the therapist’s personality or feelings might interfere with the patient’s process.
Traditional analysts also believed that their own emotional reactions — what we now call countertransference — should be suppressed. In this vein, Freud (1910) advised that the analyst should “recognize this countertransference in himself and overcome it” (p. 132).
Alongside this commitment to neutrality was the belief that interpretation was the central tool of therapy. For Freud (1915b), psychological suffering stemmed from repressions, where unacceptable thoughts or drives were pushed out of awareness. He argued that interpretation was the only way to lift a repression “by carrying what is unconscious into what is conscious” (Freud 1917a, p. 384). Once this happened, the patient could reorganize their emotional life more freely (Freud 1915a, 1917b).
This older model is sometimes called a “one-person psychology” (Aron 1990), because it focused almost entirely on what was happening inside the patient, rather than on what was happening between patient and therapist. The therapist was expected to remain neutral while interpreting the patient’s internal conflicts.
How Psychoanalysis Changed: Countertransference as a Tool
A major shift occurred with Paula Heimann’s groundbreaking paper, On Counter-Transference (1950). Heimann argued that the therapist’s emotional reaction to the patient is not a distraction, but “one of the most important tools for his work” (p. 81). Instead of avoiding these feelings, the therapist should pay careful attention to them.
Heimann noted that the therapist may feel emotions before the patient is able to express them, meaning the therapist can sense fragments of the patient’s inner experience that have not yet been put into words. She further argued that analysts should “sustain the feelings which are stirred up in him, as opposed to discharging them” (Heimann 1950, p. 82). This highlighted the importance of holding emotional experiences rather than acting them out.
This shift helped establish psychoanalysis as a “two-person psychology” (Aron 1990), where both therapist and patient contribute to the emotional field of the session. Later writers expanded this idea into what became known as intersubjectivity — the shared emotional space co-created by both members of the therapeutic pair (Stern et al. 1998; Benjamin 2004).
With this shift, neutrality was understood not as emotional distance but as reflective openness. Analysts, therefore, became encouraged to examine their own motivations, so as to be more able to actively participate in shaping the therapeutic process (Stolorow & Atwood, 1996).
Thomas Ogden: Psychoanalysis as Dreaming the Emotional Experience
Thomas Ogden deepened this contemporary approach with his concept of the analytic third — the shared emotional experience generated within the analyst as they engage with the patient (Ogden 1994a). Ogden, drawing from Bion’s (1962) work on thinking, argues that many patients come to therapy because they are unable to dream their emotional experience. By “dream,” Ogden (1997) means the ability to symbolize feelings — to make emotional experiences thinkable.
According to this model:
- Some emotional experiences are too overwhelming or unformed to put into words.
- These experiences show up as sensations, tensions, or unspoken feelings (Ogden 1997).
- If the analyst listens with reverie — a state of receptive openness — they may experience dreamlike thoughts or images that help metabolize the patient’s emotional material (Ogden 2015).
- These thoughts combine elements of the analyst’s own mind with aspects of the interpersonal situation (Ogden 2004b).
This is what Ogden calls the analytic third. Here, from the analyst’s sensations, elements that can help the patient begin symbolizing their own emotional life are shared (Ogden 1994b, 1997). The goal, as Ogden writes, is for the patient to “dream himself more fully into existence” (Ogden 2004c, p. 857).
In this sense, psychoanalysis becomes a lived emotional experience — something felt and embodied in the therapeutic relationship, not simply explained through words. This is an idea explored by Curtis Holt-Robinson in his own work with clients.
Why This Matters for Therapy Today
This contemporary view of psychoanalysis matters deeply for people seeking psychotherapy, and especially if they feel like other therapies haven’t worked before. It means:
✅ You don’t have to know how to articulate your feelings.
The therapist helps sense and hold emotional experiences that are difficult to name.
✅ The therapist’s presence matters as much as their insights.
They use their emotional reactions to better understand what you’re going through.
✅ Healing happens in the relationship itself.
The connection becomes a space where emotional experiences can be transformed.
✅ You are not alone in making sense of your inner world.
Symbolizing painful or confusing feelings becomes a shared process.
If you're feeling called to begin your own journey of healing and self-discovery, we invite you to take the next step. Book a free consultation with Curtis today, and experience firsthand the nurturing support that can help you transform your inner world.
Conclusion
This modern understanding supports Ogden’s view that psychoanalysis is “a lived emotional experience” that cannot be fully captured by words. Traditional psychoanalysis emphasized neutrality and interpretation, but contemporary psychoanalytic psychotherapy recognizes the essential role of countertransference, intersubjectivity, and the therapist’s capacity to dream the emotional experience with the patient.
By holding and metabolizing previously unthinkable emotional material, the analyst helps the patient learn to symbolize and understand feelings that were once overwhelming. This creates space for genuine emotional change — something which many people seek when beginning psychotherapy. A related exploration of psychoanalytic ideas can be found in our blog post, Understanding Bion’s Theory of Thinking: How Psychoanalysis Shapes Emotions.
References
Aron, L. (1990) One person and two person psychologies and the method of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 7(4), 475–485.
Benjamin, J. (2004) Beyond doer and done to: An intersubjective view of thirdness. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73(1), 5–46.
Bion, W. R. (1962) The psycho-analytic study of thinking. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 43, 306–310.
Freud, S. (1910) The future prospects of psychoanalytic therapy. In The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 11, pp. 125–137). Rowman & Littlefield.
Freud, S. (1912) Recommendations to physicians practicing psychoanalysis. In The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12, pp. 103–115). Rowman & Littlefield.
Freud, S. (1915a) Drives and their vicissitudes. In The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14, pp. 99–126). Rowman & Littlefield.
Freud, S. (1915b) Repression. In The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14, pp. 125–139). Rowman & Littlefield.
Freud, S. (1917a) Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. In The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 16, pp. 215–409). Rowman & Littlefield.
Freud, S. (1917b) Mourning and melancholia. In The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14, pp. 211–232). Rowman & Littlefield.
Heimann, P. (1950) On counter-transference. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 31, 81–84.
Ogden, T. H. (1994a) The analytic third: Working with intersubjective clinical facts. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 75(1), 3–19.
Ogden, T. H. (1994b) The concept of interpretive action. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 63(2), 219–245.
Ogden, T. H. (1997) Reverie and interpretation. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 66(4), 567–595.
Ogden, T. H. (2004b) The analytic third: Implications for psychoanalytic theory and technique. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73(1), 167–195.
Ogden, T. H. (2004c) This art of psychoanalysis. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 85(4), 857–877.
Ogden, T. H. (2015) Intuiting the truth of what’s happening: On Bion’s “Notes on memory and desire.” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 84(2), 285–306.
Stern, D. N., Sander, L. W., Nahum, J. P., Harrison, A. M., Lyons-Ruth, K., Morgan, A. C., Bruschweiler-Stern, N., & Tronick, E. Z. (1998) Non-interpretive mechanisms in psychoanalytic therapy. The “something more” than interpretation. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 79(5), 903–921.
Stolorow, R. D., & Atwood, G. E. (1996) The intersubjective perspective. Psychoanalytic Review, 83(2), 181–194.