This chapter describes specific techniques employed in modern day psychodynamic psychotherapy. It commences with a brief outline of the core psychodynamic attitude consisting of relative restraint, ‘anonymity’, and ‘neutrality’ along with helpful tips for the psychotherapist at the start of their career. It then goes on to a section on the importance of unconscious communication which includes a brief instruction on dream interpretation. This is followed by a detailed description on the use of transference and countertransference to elicit relevant object relations; this section includes how to manage ruptures in therapy. There is a description of the spectrum of interventions and techniques used in psychodynamic psychotherapy ranging from the more supportive end of the spectrum through to the more expressive. The chapter concludes with the process of working through and managing resistance. Throughout there are suggestions for how to couch interventions when working with a patient and also clinical vignettes to illustrate key techniques.

It is one of the remarkable but also unsettling characteristics of psychodynamic psychotherapy that its course is not rigidly predetermined; this allows things to emerge in therapy that neither the therapist nor patient could have anticipated. What focus the work takes and what therapeutic approaches are most useful for each patient need to be found out along the way. This does not however mean it is impossible to give direction or that there is no structure to therapy. In this chapter, we aim to provide orientation to clinicians who are embarking on their first courses of therapy. We integrate theory and technique to offer a longitudinal perspective on how matters can play out over a course of therapy. Firstly, we discuss the formation of the therapeutic alliance and the development of a psychodynamic formulation. The central part of this chapter looks at the therapeutic relationship as a vehicle for change. Finally, we discuss the late phase of therapy and the dynamics of separation from the therapist, and how this can be both a challenging but productive period.

The Partition of the South Asian subcontinent in 1947 into modern nation states of India, Pakistan is the historic event that not only inaugurated nationalities where political identities were based on religious differences, but also erased the collective identities different religious communities shared in their struggle against British colonialism over two centuries. In the celebration of India’s independence, the unprecedented violence of Partition is written out of the narrative of the nation as an aberration, a cataclysmic moment of madness. This chapter engages with this moment of madness captured in the Urdu short stories of Sa’adat Hasan Manto and highlights the psychoanalytic role of literature in remembering the violence that haunts India in the its pervasive communal strife. Focusing on Manto’s short stories, this chapter explains how literature allows working through the repressed violence of Partition fostering possibilities of mourning collective communal losses.