Psychoanalysis in Melbourne
Psychoanalytic Therapy for adults and adolescents in Richmond, Prahran, South Yarra and surrounds, and Australia-wide by telehealth.
A practice of speech, in Richmond.
A practice of speech, in Richmond.
Psychoanalysis is a practice of speech. It begins from the premise that what most concerns us what repeats, what holds us, what we cannot quite say, is not fully available to conscious thought, and cannot be reached by instruction or technique. It can only be reached by speaking freely, and by listening to what speaking produces.
— Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
Freud’s claim is a strong one, and it remains the centre of analytic work. We are not masters in our own house. The unconscious is not a hidden basement of dark secrets; it is something structured, something that speaks. Whether that be in dreams, in the body, in slips of the tongue, in symptoms, and in what we cannot stop repeating. Analysis is the practice of listening for it.
Psychoanalysis is called a work for a reason. It is not a service one consumes, nor a course of care administered to a passive patient. It asks something of the person who undertakes it: that they speak, that they keep speaking, that they bring their dreams, their symptoms, their hesitations and their repetitions into language and let them be heard. Freud called the slow, recursive labour at the heart of it Durcharbeitung: working-through. The analyst listens, punctuates, holds the frame. The analysand does the speaking. What changes, changes through that. It is not a medicinal relation and there is indeed, dangers of speaking through a master discourse.
It is, equally, not a place of cure. Psychoanalysis does not aim at adaptation, symptom relief, or the management of distress, though these may follow and indeed occur. However, it does not promise a return to a former self, or the achievement of a corrected one. It aims at something more specific: that a person come to encounter what is singular in their own history, their symptoms and their desire, and find a different relation to it. People often do experience a transformation in the course of analysis. The transformation is not the goal; what comes from being able, finally, to speak something that had remained unspoken is.
A short orientation to the vocabulary of the work. The ‘linguistricks’ of the couch.
Freud’s discovery that the ego is not master in its own house remains the centre of analytic work. Lacan put it sharply: the unconscious is structured like a language. To work with the unconscious is to work with your speech, to hear what you say, and to put to work what your speech does not know it is saying.
A dream is not random noise, and a slip of the tongue is not a meaningless error. Both are ways the unconscious finds words for what waking speech cannot say, and both are taken seriously in analysis.
“The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.”
— Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Not daydreaming, but a particular scene. Sometimes vivid, sometimes barely conscious, that quietly organises a person’s desire and their position in the world. Working through one’s fantasy is one of the things analysis makes possible and is welcomed without judgement.
Human beings are pushed by something that is not the same as instinct, and that finds satisfaction in places that do not always look like pleasure. Sometimes, often, in our symptoms. The French word jouissance, kept untranslated in Lacanian work, names this strange satisfaction we take in what hurts us.
What develops between an analysand and an analyst. Old patterns, old addresses, old expectations brought into the room and is not a problem to be managed. It is the medium in which the work takes place. Without transference, analysis does not happen.
Psychoanalysis is not defined by diagnosis. People arrive for many reasons, and often without a clear one. What tends to be common is the sense that something does not yield to ordinary explanation or ordinary help.
You may be considering analysis if:
You do not need to know in advance what is wrong. The work begins by speaking, and by seeing what emerges through this vocal drive.
Psychoanalysis does not begin immediately. Before analysis can commence, a series of preliminary sessions is undertaken, typically between two and five.
These first meetings are an opportunity to speak about what has brought you here. That may be trauma, sexual difficulties, obsessive thoughts, compulsive behaviours, emotional dysregulation, anger outbursts, or distress that is harder to name. Many people come without a clear reason, and with a persistent sense that something is wrong, stuck, or repetitive.
The work in these sessions often begins by tracing your history. We move from childhood and adolescence through to the present, attending not only to what you say but to how speech unfolds.
Diagnostic considerations and treatment-plan questions may arise, particularly in relation to other forms of care, but they are not the aim of this phase. The aim is to open a space in which the unconscious can begin to emerge. What appears here helps determine whether psychoanalysis is the appropriate path.
At the conclusion of the preliminary work, we consider:
The fundamental rule of any psychoanalysis is the commitment to speak anything and everything that comes to mind. You are invited to speak as freely as you can, without censoring, without organising your thoughts in advance, without the demand to be coherent. A memory, a slip, a dream, a silence: any of these may turn out to matter.
Sessions do not run to a fixed agenda. There is no worksheet, no protocol, no homework. The work is in what is said.
Sessions in this tradition are not always of fixed duration. A session may run a standard length, or it may close at a moment when something has been said that warrants pause. This is not arbitrary and it is what is called scansion, and it is part of how analytic work allows what has emerged to take effect rather than be smoothed over by the next sentence.
Over time, what changes in analysis is rarely what people expect at the outset. The symptom may not vanish; the history does not rewrite itself. What shifts is your relation to them.
Engaging a Lacanian psychoanalyst means choosing a path that prioritises depth over the pressure of quick results. The work treats what is said and what remains unsaid, as meaningful. It supports sustained reflection rather than offering coping strategies or protocols.
My orientation is to causation and to the particular, rather than to universal diagnostic categories. The work resists the institutional pressure to standardise distress, and it does not promise outcomes it cannot deliver. What it offers is a frame in which a person’s singular history can be met with attention, and worked with.
The fundamental rule of any psychoanalysis is the commitment to speak anything and everything that comes to mind. You are invited to speak as freely as you can, without censoring, without organising your thoughts in advance, without the demand to be coherent. A memory, a slip, a dream, a silence: any of these may turn out to matter.
Sessions do not run to a fixed agenda. There is no worksheet, no protocol, no homework. The work is in what is said.
Sessions in this tradition are not always of fixed duration. A session may run a standard length, or it may close at a moment when something has been said that warrants pause. This is not arbitrary and it is what is called scansion, and it is part of how analytic work allows what has emerged to take effect rather than be smoothed over by the next sentence.
Over time, what changes in analysis is rarely what people expect at the outset. The symptom may not vanish; the history does not rewrite itself. What shifts is your relation to them.
Weekly sessions are usual. Some analysands attend twice a week or more; fortnightly is the minimum at which analytic work can be sustained. Frequency is established during the preliminary phase.
Level 1, 53 Erin Street, Richmond, Victoria 3121. Telehealth Australia-wide where clinically appropriate.
Discussed in the preliminary sessions. Medicare rebates may be available under a Mental Health Care Plan from your GP.
GPs and colleagues are welcome to refer directly. Particular clinical interest in conversion, FND, and somatic presentations.
Reaching out can feel like a significant decision. The preliminary sessions offer a grounded space to discuss what has brought you to treatment and to consider whether this approach is the right fit for you. Should psychoanalysis prove appropriate, we will determine the frame in which it may take place.
Typically between two and five sessions, depending on the nature of what emerges and how speech begins to take shape.
Weekly sessions are usual. Some analysands attend twice a week or more; fortnightly is the minimum at which analytic work can be sustained.
Yes, where clinically appropriate. This is one of the matters considered in the preliminary phase.
Medicare rebates may be available under a Mental Health Care Plan from your GP. The number of rebated sessions per year is limited; fees beyond that are discussed in the preliminary sessions.
Freud, S. & Breuer, J. (1895). Studies on Hysteria.
Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams.
Freud, S. (1905). Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (the Dora case).
Freud, S. (1916–1917). Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Standard Edition, Vols. XV–XVI.
Zellner, M. (Ed.) (2025). From hysteria to conversion disorder to FND. Neuropsychoanalysis, 27(1).
Lacan, J. (1981). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Norton.
Laplanche, J. & Pontalis, J.-B. (1973). The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Norton.
Solms, M. (2021). The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness. Norton.
Verhaeghe, P. (2004). On Being Normal and Other Disorders. Other Press.