Types of Psychodynamic Therapy: 22 Approaches Explained

Point 5 of 10 · Through your story

Enters at the circle — the lens

Through your story

These therapies work on the circle itself: the beliefs you learned before you could choose them, the patterns that repeat across decades and relationships, the story you see through rather than look at. Some rewrite the story directly; some trace it back to where it began.

This point might fit if the same pattern keeps finding you, if childhood still runs the show, or if quick fixes have never quite reached the root.

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Schema therapy

Targets the deep, early-formed beliefs (“I’m defective,” “people leave”) that repeat across a lifetime — combining cognitive, experiential, and reparenting methods, with strong evidence in personality-level patterns.

Narrative therapy

“The person is not the problem; the problem is the problem.” It externalizes the story you’ve been living inside and helps you author a truer one.

Read the full narrative therapy guide →

Internal family systems (IFS)

Treats the mind as a family of parts — protectors, exiles, managers — led by a core Self that therapy helps unburden them. One of the fastest-growing approaches in practice today.

Solution-focused brief therapy

Spends its time on exceptions and futures rather than problems and pasts: when is the problem absent, and what would the first small sign of better look like?

Read the full SFBT guide →

Coherence therapy

Works from the premise that symptoms make emotional sense: find the hidden “pro-symptom” belief, bring it into awareness, and let contradictory experience dissolve it.

Personal construct therapy

Kelly’s approach: we each see through a personal system of constructs, and therapy is the collaborative science of testing and revising them.

Collaborative language systems

A postmodern, conversation-centered therapy in which client and therapist are co-inquirers, and change happens through new dialogue rather than expert diagnosis.

Ego state therapy

Works directly with distinct states of self — the wounded child, the inner critic — often alongside hypnosis or EMDR, to resolve internal conflicts.

Psychoanalysis (Freudian, Kleinian, Lacanian)

The original depth psychology: frequent sessions, free association, and the transference relationship, aimed at lasting structural change rather than symptom relief alone.

Jungian analysis

Depth work with dreams, symbols, and archetypes — individuation as the lifelong task of becoming who you actually are.

Adlerian therapy

Focuses on belonging, purpose, and the “private logic” formed in early family life — encouraging, practical, and community-minded.

Object relations

Explores how earliest relationships become internal templates — the “objects” we carry — that shape every relationship after.

Self psychology (Kohut)

Centers empathy and the needs that build a cohesive self — mirroring, idealizing, belonging — and what happens in adulthood when they went unmet.

Relational psychoanalysis

Modern analysis in which the relationship between two real people — including the therapist’s humanity — is itself the engine of change.

Short-term psychodynamic therapy

Depth work on a clock: a focused dynamic theme, active technique, and a defined end — with a solid evidence base for depression and anxiety.

ISTDP

Intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy: moment-to-moment attention to how you avoid feeling, pressing gently but persistently toward the emotion underneath.

AEDP

Accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy: healing happens in felt moments of connection — the therapy tracks glimmers of transformation and expands them.

Transference-focused psychotherapy

A structured psychodynamic treatment for borderline patterns that works with how the relationship template plays out live, with the therapist, session by session.

Mentalization-based treatment

Strengthens the capacity to keep minds in mind — your own and others’ — especially when emotion runs high; well evidenced for borderline personality disorder.

Dynamic interpersonal therapy

A brief, manualized psychodynamic therapy for depression organized around one central relationship pattern.

Supportive-expressive therapy

Identifies your core conflictual relationship theme — the wish, the response you expect, the response you give — and works it through in a supportive frame.

Attachment-based psychotherapy

Uses attachment science as the map: how early bonds shaped your settings for closeness and threat, and how a secure therapeutic bond can reset them.

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The Triangle Therapist Guide to Types of Therapy

See where this family sits among all ten points — two hundred therapies, one map. Find your place in the Triangle.

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Reading about it is a beginning. Talking about it is a next step.

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