JoAnn Culbert-Koehn, Jungian Psychoanalyst

My Work

              







I work with each person who comes to my office with compassion and respect, knowing that each patient has a unique story.  I am interested in learning why you have come to see me. I want to understand what kind of help you may want or need.  Beginning therapy is often difficult and it may take time before you fully know why you have begun therapy. Often people who come to see me have been living a false-self  life, and are looking to find their true, more authentic self.  Among the psychological problems I address are anxiety, depression, marital problems, and grief as well as stuckness in career or personal growth.

The treatment I offer is tailored to the patient’s individual needs.  I am trained to do psychotherapy and Jungian psychoanalysis.  In psychotherapy we explore what is causing you psychic or physical pain as well as additional symptoms, or trauma as they emerge.

Jungian psychoanalysis is a specialized form of psychotherapy for which special training is required; I trained for 9 years at the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles (junginla.org).  After graduation in 1985, I continued my training with further supervision and analysis, based on the ideas of Melanie Klein, Winnicott, and Wilfred Bion, which I have integrated with my Jungian training.

The focus of Jungian psychoanalysis is to access the unconscious and see what your unconscious has to tell us about your problem and your future development – for example, where is your development stuck or blocked.  Both Freud and Jung believed that dreams were a good way to access or explore the unconscious and try to understand how it speaks to us.  Jung thought that the unconscious serves a compensatory function – for example, if you were treating someone in your personal life in a dismissive way, you might dream of the person as large and towering over you – calling attention to the fact that you are treating the person as much too small.  Learning about the unconscious is a fascinating journey, although sometimes painful, and I am among the people that find making a relationship to your unconscious facilitated by a good analyst, one of the most interesting conversations on earth. The unconscious seems to have an unending treasure of symbols and images to communicate to us.