The psychoanalytic model presented on this website differs from many others.
The clinicians at Hollywood Psychotherapy come from diverse training backgrounds and may draw from multiple schools of psychoanalytic thought. Rather than adhering to a single doctrine, our work reflects a broader field shaped by different traditions and interpretations.
Below is an overview of several major lineages within psychoanalysis, adapted from Barnaby Barratt’s What is Psychoanalysis? 100 Years After Freud’s “Secret Committee” (2013).
Major Psychoanalytic Lineages
1. Classical Freudians
Practitioners who identify with Freud’s original body of work — though what qualifies as “classical” is often debated.
2. Kleinian & Bionian Traditions
Clinicians influenced by Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, and their successors, often grouped under “neo-Kleinian” approaches.
3. Independent Object Relations
A diverse group including Donald Winnicott, Ronald Fairbairn, and Harry Guntrip, each offering distinct perspectives on relational development.
4. Ego Psychology
A framework focused on the structural and functional aspects of the mind, associated with figures like Anna Freud and Heinz Hartmann.
5. Self Psychology
Centered on the work of Heinz Kohut, emphasizing the development of the self and the role of empathy in clinical work.
6. Relational & Intersubjective Approaches
A broad category drawing from object relations and self psychology, including relational and interpersonal schools.
7. Lacanian Psychoanalysis
Practitioners grounded in the work of Jacques Lacan, often emphasizing language, structure, and the unconscious.
8. Post-Structural & Contemporary Approaches
Influenced by existentialism, feminism, deconstruction, post-colonial thought, and somatic psychology — a highly diverse and evolving field.
Barratt, B.B. (2013). What is psychoanalysis? 100 years after Freud’s “secret committee.” New York: Routledge.
What is the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis?
The healing potential of psychoanalysis depends entirely on how one defines the unconscious. To understand the psychoanalytic definition, we must first distinguish it from more common concepts. For instance, Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating how “unconscious” operations like cognitive biases undermine rational decision-making. While the psychological sciences are full of such examples, Freud’s repressed unconscious is fundamentally different from this descriptive unconscious.
The descriptive unconscious—often called the “non-conscious” or “preconscious”—is the basis for most psychotherapies and even some simplified versions of psychoanalysis. A typical example is a therapist helping you realize how your childhood relationship with your mother affects your marriage. In true psychoanalysis, this isn’t “making the unconscious conscious.” If a thought or memory can be easily brought to awareness through simple insight, it was never truly the unconscious to begin with. Thoughts and memories can be suppressed, forgotten, or never even fully formulated but these mechanisms of keeping mental material out of awareness are different than repression.
In psychoanalysis proper, the unconscious is the product of repression—it is not the product of suppression, or forgetting, or disavowal or any of the other mechanisms of defense. Repression occurs when mental material, or potential mental material is banished from awareness beyond a barrier from which it can never return except as a contradictory unsettling of that which is verbally expressed.