I am a UK-registered psychoanalyst (College of Psychoanalysts UK, Association for Group and Individual Psychotherapy). I work mainly online and also have a private psychoanalytic practice near Munich in Germany. My approach is based on fundamental psychoanalytic principles, such as the reality of the unconscious in shaping our day-to-day lives, the value of dreams and unstructured talking (free association), and the conviction that human beings can indeed change fundamentally when we are given the space to do so.

I am not beholden to any particular school of psychoanalytic thought and see psychoanalysis as a field consisting of a number of traditions that build directly on the work of Freud, notwithstanding some important differences between them. I find the thinking of Carl Gustav Jung and Jacques Lacan invaluable to understanding the human mind.

However, no theory is set in stone. Our assumptions need to be questioned constantly, and this needs to happen in the face of individual human experience in every analytic hour. No two analyses are ever the same. The reason why psychoanalysis is so difficult to study empirically is precisely this: it is being reinvented for and with ever single patient.

Dr Corinna Arndt