Author: Fernando Rocha

You may have noticed that something seems to repeat itself in your relationships. Perhaps you keep becoming involved with people who are emotionally unavailable. Perhaps you find yourself giving too much, withdrawing when someone gets close, becoming anxious when a relationship begins to matter, or feeling that you somehow end up in the same situation…

When people search for a psychoanalyst, they may already have some idea of what psychoanalysis is. Perhaps they have read Freud or Lacan, heard about the unconscious, or simply feel that conventional ways of understanding their difficulties have not quite answered the questions they are asking. But what does a psychoanalyst actually do? And what…

Sometimes nothing is obviously wrong. Work is going reasonably well. A relationship may be stable. Life may look very different from what it once did. Perhaps we have achieved something we worked hard for, or finally reached a point we had imagined would make us feel settled. And yet, something remains. A sense of dissatisfaction.…

There are moments when we seem to know exactly what needs to change. We know that a relationship is no longer working. We know that a particular habit leaves us feeling worse. We know that we keep responding to certain situations in ways we later regret. We may even know, quite clearly, what we would…

A softly lit open doorway symbolising the beginning of a first psychoanalytic session in Sydney.

Not knowing what you want is more common than it seems. This article explores how desire can become obscure, and why clarity cannot simply be forced.

Why does the same thing keep happening, with different people, in different circumstances? Psychoanalysis does not treat repetition as failure — it asks what the pattern is carrying, and why it has not yet been able to stop.

There is a particular confusion that comes when you find yourself undoing what you have worked to build. Psychoanalysis does not treat this as a failure of willpower — it asks what the pattern is carrying that has not yet been heard.

Some habits do not simply stop — they return. Psychoanalysis asks not why we fail to change, but what the symptom is carrying that has not yet been heard.

When does analysis begin? A psychoanalysis reflection on the moment speech exceeds intention and something unexpected emerges.