A psychotherapist returned from a conference in Switzerland, where the delegates spent more time on the icy ski slopes than attending lectures and seminars.
When she got back, her husband asked her, "So, how did it go?"
"Fine," she replied, "but I've never seen so many Freudians slip."
Psychodynamic therapy is an umbrella term for many different therapies that all share the idea that it is the development of the relationship between client and therapist and the characteristics of that relationship, that is the essential ingredient for effective therapy.
Another shared idea is that many of our thoughts and motivations are unconscious and largely unknown to us and yet they drive our behaviours. Perhaps what distinguishes it most from other approaches is its emphasis on uncovering painful emotions, and all the thoughts, behaviours and physical sensations associated with them, facilitating emotional experience and at the same time increasing insight or understanding regarding past and present experience and how these are linked.
There is so much literature from this approach dating from the late 1800s when Sigmund Freud, first started to develop psychoanalytic theory and practice. Much of the literature is based on different clinicians' ideas as to what pathology is and how to treat it.
Modern theories have veered from the original Freudian notions, but some of those ideas remain as robust as ever. Indeed, in the psychodynamic literature, the evidence-base is much more practice-based evidence than the scientific gold standard of RCTs (Randomised Controlled Trials). This approach has more or less disappeared from Psychology training with a preference there for CBT and Systemic approaches.
I predict that this will change as the shortcomings of CBT become more apparent and as new research in neuroscience is throwing up confirmation of many core psychodynamic ideas, perhaps the most important of which is the neurological evidence that is showing how the earliest relationships affect the physical development of a young child's brain, affecting thinking and the capacity to manage emotions.
The importance of mirroring in a child's early development is essential for the development of empathy and latest research in neuroscience has established the role of mirror neurons in human relatedness.