Psychotherapy refers to any procedure based on the interaction between a professional and a patient and which is meant to help or heal the patient’s emotional or mental disturbance, pain, or disorder.
Psychoanalysis (or just “analysis”) is not just another word for psychotherapy. It is a very particular kind of psychotherapy. It takes place between two people, the analyst and the analysand. It aims to help the analysand: -better understand themselves and their ways of interacting with other people and the world -to help ease the misery associated with various psychological disorders by illuminating their reasons for existing, and perhaps changing them in the process -to gain greater freedom in decision-making, and to deal with complicated issues of identity, life goals, and amorphous difficult to specify problems of dealing with the world
What distinguishes psychoanalysis from other therapies is that it doesn’t assume that the patient consciously knows what they want. There is a belief in an unconscious which affects the patient’s actions. One way or another, the aim of psychoanalysis is to reveal this unconscious.
It does so through the medium of the patient’s interactions with the analyst. The patient’s interactions will be influenced by their unconscious; this influence is called transference. Some part of the patient may also resist insight and change; this is called resistance. This too is very important information from the standpoint of analysis.
There are many different schools of theory and practice within psychoanalysis, but they all descend from Freud, though their ideas may have largely departed from the specifics of his.
Psychoanalysis proper — which is considered the most rigorous, demanding, time- and effort-intensive form, but also the most powerful and long-lasting in its effects — is to be distinguished from its somewhat less-demanding sibling, psychoanalytic or psychodynamic psychotherapy.
This kind of psychotherapy works with psychoanalytic principles, but is often considered to have a lesser frequency of sessions and to be generally less intensive.
Psychotherapy generally encompasses all kinds of talk therapies, even those that function on very different principles from psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic psychotherapy.