The new manager's first team meeting ran twenty minutes, mostly logistics — a shared calendar, a reporting structure, an easy question about time zones. Nothing in it was unusual. And yet by the second slide, an old, specific tightness had already arrived: the particular alertness of waiting to be corrected in front of other people, the reflexive rehearsal of a defense for a question that hadn't been asked yet. The manager had done nothing to earn this. A three-second pause before answering a question was the only thing that had actually happened, and it was already doing more work than three seconds should.
By the end of the week, a private, largely unexamined case had been built: this one is going to be like the others. No evidence beyond the pause supported it. The case felt, from the inside, entirely reasonable.
Sigmund Freud, working with patients in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, noticed something inconvenient happening in his consulting room: patients related to him not as the person he actually was but as a stand-in for someone earlier and more consequential — a parent, an authority, a figure whose approval had once mattered enormously. He called this transference, and though he first described it as a feature of the analytic relationship specifically, the pattern he was naming doesn't stay confined to a therapist's office. It shows up anywhere a person occupies a role that resembles an earlier one — a manager, a mentor, anyone positioned, even briefly, as an authority whose read of you might matter.
What makes transference difficult to catch in the moment is that it doesn't feel like a memory — it feels like an accurate read of the present person, delivered with the same certainty as any other perception. The pause before the new manager answered a question did not register as old material resurfacing. It registered as information about the new manager. The template supplies its own confirmation before the conscious mind gets a vote, and by the time the case is built, it feels less like a theory than a fact already established.
The people I work with in New York — in Midtown and the Financial District, on the Upper West Side, and in Brooklyn Heights — often bring a version of this from the workplace specifically, because the workplace supplies so many candidates for it: managers, senior colleagues, anyone whose opinion carries some cost if it goes badly. What's harder to see from inside the reaction is that the present person is rarely its actual subject. Psychodynamic therapy is interested in that gap — less concerned with correcting someone's read of a new manager than with finding out who else is in the room.
I work with adults throughout New York — in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and across the city — via telehealth. Prospective clients are welcome to reach out at jonathanwalsh@hushmail.com or to request a complimentary 15-minute consultation through this site.
Frequently Asked Questions about Psychodynamic Therapy
What is psychodynamic therapy?
Psychodynamic therapy explores how early relationships and unconscious patterns shape the way we think, feel, and behave in the present. It focuses less on specific symptoms and more on understanding the deeper dynamics that keep them in place.
What does psychodynamic therapy help with?
It is well-suited for recurring relationship patterns, persistent feelings of stuckness, anxiety, depression, and the gap between knowing what you want to change and actually changing it.
How is psychodynamic therapy different from CBT?
CBT works directly on thoughts and behaviors in the present. Psychodynamic therapy uses the lens of the past to understand how patterns move in the present, treating insight into their origins as part of what makes change possible.
Who is a good fit for psychodynamic therapy?
It tends to work well for people who have tried other approaches and remain stuck, or who are drawn to understanding themselves at a deeper level rather than managing symptoms alone.
Jonathan Walsh, LMHC, LCMHC, LPC is a licensed therapist offering psychodynamic therapy via telehealth in New York and several other states. He is a member of the New England Center for Existential Therapy and has completed core training at the Institute for Existential-Psychoanalytic Therapy. Learn more about Jonathan.