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In-depth psychotherapy for adults with a Melbourne-based registered psychologist. Sessions online, weekday mornings AEST.
People come to psychodynamic therapy for different reasons. Some have spent a great deal of time trying to understand themselves, while others may simply know that something in their life is not working as they would like.
You may recognise a pattern that keeps repeating, whether in relationships, work or other areas of life, without understanding why. Or you may understand your patterns intellectually. You can name them, trace where they came from and explain them clearly to a friend, yet find that they have not shifted.
Others have previously tried therapy focused on managing symptoms or practising strategies. This may have been helpful up to a point, while leaving a sense that something underlying was never quite reached. You may want to understand why a pattern continues to repeat, rather than only how to cope with it when it does.
Psychodynamic therapy offers a way of exploring these underlying patterns and the experiences, relationships and unconscious processes that may help to sustain them.
Psychodynamic therapy explores how past experiences, relationships and patterns that are not always fully conscious can influence the way you think, feel and relate to yourself and others in the present. It pays close attention to relationships, including the therapeutic relationship itself, as well as thoughts, feelings and experiences that may influence your life without being fully understood.
Rather than focusing only on symptoms, psychodynamic therapy aims to develop a deeper understanding of the patterns underlying your difficulties. Exploring your thoughts, feelings, relationships and experiences over time can help you make sense of patterns that may otherwise feel confusing, repetitive or difficult to change. Psychodynamic therapy is based on the idea that psychological difficulties have meaning and context, and that understanding where they come from and how they continue to shape your life can support meaningful change.
A lot of psychological difficulty doesn’t respond to being reasoned with. You can know intellectually that a fear is disproportionate or a pattern is not working for you, and still find yourself caught in it. That gap between what you understand and what you feel and do can be an important focus of psychodynamic therapy.
Over the course of therapy, attention may be given to things like:
These patterns may be connected to past experiences, including early relationships and childhood, and to material that sits outside immediate awareness. The aim isn’t to assign blame to your history, but to understand how it continues to shape the present. Developing this understanding can make patterns more accessible to exploration and change.
Psychodynamic therapy works gradually and relationally, rather than through a fixed sequence of techniques. Two features are central to how change happens.
In psychodynamic work, the therapeutic relationship is not just the backdrop to the therapy. It is one of the places where the work actually happens. The ways you relate to other people, often shaped by earlier relationships, tend to emerge within therapy too, where they can be noticed and explored as they occur rather than only discussed in the abstract.
This is part of what distinguishes the approach. When a pattern shows up in the therapeutic relationship, it can be understood as it happens. That kind of direct, felt understanding can reach something that talking about a pattern after the fact may not.
A good deal of what influences how we feel and behave sits outside conscious awareness. Psychodynamic therapy takes this seriously, not mystically, but practically. Through open, unstructured conversation, feelings and patterns that are not immediately obvious can gradually come into view.
This can include noticing what emerges when you speak freely without editing, and paying attention to the meaning found in dreams, fantasies or recurring preoccupations. None of this is about decoding hidden messages or arriving at neat interpretations. It is about creating space for parts of your experience that usually stay out of view to become available for reflection.
Psychodynamic therapy has its own vocabulary. You don’t need any of it to benefit, but if you’re considering whether this approach suits you, a plain-language sense of some core ideas can help. Each of these matters only if it relates to your actual experience.
Not everything that influences us is available to conscious thought. Feelings, motivations and conflicts can operate outside awareness while still shaping mood, choices and relationships. Much of psychodynamic work involves bringing some of this into greater awareness, so it can be reflected on rather than simply acted out.
We tend to bring patterns from significant past relationships into present ones, including the relationship with a therapist. When this happens in therapy, it is not a distraction or a problem. It can provide useful information. Noticing how you relate within the therapeutic relationship can reveal patterns that may also operate elsewhere in your life.
Defences are ways of protecting ourselves from feelings that are difficult to bear, through avoidance, minimising, intellectualising or turning feelings into their opposite, among many others. They usually developed for good reason. Therapy is interested less in dismantling them than in understanding what they protect, and whether they are still serving you.
Our early relationships, including how we attach to our caregivers, can shape how we experience closeness, trust and emotional connection, as well as what we expect from ourselves and others in relationships. These patterns can continue to influence us outside of conscious awareness, particularly when relationships become emotionally significant. Exploring attachment can help shed light on how earlier experiences may relate to difficulties or recurring patterns in relationships today.
Insight in this context is not just intellectual understanding. It is a deeper recognition of how your patterns work, what they may mean and where they came from. This kind of understanding can help bring patterns that once felt automatic into greater awareness, creating more room to reflect on and explore them.
Psychodynamic therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) take different approaches to psychological difficulties. CBT can be helpful for developing practical strategies to manage particular symptoms and patterns. Psychodynamic therapy takes a different approach, seeking to understand the underlying emotional and relational patterns that contribute to psychological difficulties.
CBT often focuses on identifying patterns in thoughts, emotions and behaviours, and may involve structured exercises or strategies to practise between sessions. Psychodynamic therapy places greater emphasis on understanding emotional patterns, relationships and experiences that may continue to shape how you think, feel and respond, including in ways that are not always immediately obvious. Rather than focusing primarily on changing a particular thought or behaviour, psychodynamic therapy considers what may be underlying it.
Alicia is trained in a range of evidence-based approaches, including cognitive behavioural approaches such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). In her current practice, she works exclusively psychodynamically because she believes that understanding the underlying patterns contributing to psychological difficulties offers a more meaningful basis for change. This approach may be particularly suited to people who want to explore why their difficulties persist, including those who already have insight into their patterns but find that they continue despite this understanding.
Yes. There is a substantial and growing body of research supporting psychodynamic therapy for a range of presentations, including depression, anxiety, and difficulties with relationships and personality. A widely cited review in American Psychologist (Shedler, 2010) found that effect sizes for psychodynamic therapy were comparable to those reported for other therapies actively promoted as “evidence-based.” Notably, the review also found that gains often continued, and in some cases increased, after therapy ended. This is consistent with an approach that aims to understand and address underlying difficulties rather than focusing only on short-term symptom relief.
It is worth naming a common assumption directly: psychodynamic therapy is sometimes imagined as old-fashioned or unproven, a relic of a much earlier era of psychology. This is simply not an accurate picture of the approach. Contemporary psychodynamic therapy has its roots in psychoanalysis and continues to draw on psychoanalytic thinking about the unconscious, relationships and the meaning of psychological difficulties. Alicia’s training at Victoria University took an integrative approach spanning both cognitive behavioural and psychodynamic traditions. In her current practice, she works exclusively psychodynamically.
Different approaches suit different people, and no single one is right for everybody. Psychodynamic therapy tends to be a particularly good fit if you:
Psychodynamic therapy is generally medium to long-term, as developing a deeper understanding of yourself and your patterns takes time. Alicia generally suggests beginning with weekly or fortnightly sessions where possible, as this supports continuity and meaningful work. The pace and duration of therapy can be discussed as the work develops and will depend on your circumstances and what you hope to explore.
Alicia Shevlin (she/her) is a registered psychologist and clinical psychology registrar based in Melbourne, working with adults across Australia via telehealth.
Her training is central to how she works. She completed a Master of Applied Psychology (Clinical Psychology) at Victoria University, where psychologists are trained from a broad, integrative perspective that extends beyond cognitive behavioural therapy to include a psychodynamic approach — a foundation that continues to shape her clinical work. In her current practice, she works exclusively psychodynamically.
Alicia began her career in mental health in 2016 in the domestic and family violence sector, and has since worked across community, university, and public health settings before entering private practice. She takes a non-pathologising approach, placing less weight on diagnostic labels and more on understanding each person as an individual, including how relationships, life circumstances, class, sexuality, and broader social pressures shape psychological difficulty. She works with adults aged 18 and over, and with people of all genders, sexual orientations, and sex characteristics.
AHPRA registration: PSY0002275993
Member: Australian Psychological Society
Alicia works psychodynamically with adults across a wide range of concerns. Each of the areas below has its own page with more detail.
Alicia also works with stress and burnout, body image concerns, eating disorders, addiction or problematic substance use, anger, and identity-related concerns.
Alicia is Melbourne-based and works entirely via telehealth, with sessions held over Zoom.
Psychodynamic therapy depends heavily on the therapeutic relationship and on consistency over time, and telehealth supports exactly that kind of steady, ongoing work. Attending from a familiar private space can make it easier to speak openly, and removing the practical demands of travel makes regular attendance more sustainable, which matters for an approach built around continuity.
Practically, you’ll need a private space where you won’t be overheard, a stable internet connection, and a device with a camera. Headphones help.
Appointments are available on weekday mornings only, scheduled in Australian Eastern Standard Time (or AEDT during Victorian daylight saving), both before and after 9:00 am AEST.
Service area: Because of the session times, psychodynamic therapy with Alicia is typically most suitable for people in Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, the ACT and the Northern Territory. Whether you’re looking for a psychodynamic psychologist in Melbourne, a psychodynamic therapist offering telehealth in Victoria, or online psychodynamic sessions elsewhere in eastern and central Australia, appointments are available within those time zones.
It varies depending on your circumstances and what you hope to explore. Alicia’s approach is generally suited to medium- to long-term work, providing time to understand longstanding patterns in depth.
Pace and duration are discussed throughout. Under a Mental Health Treatment Plan, Medicare rebates are available for up to 10 individual sessions per calendar year, and therapy can continue beyond that at the private billing rate if you choo
No to both. You can book directly with Alicia without a referral or a Mental Health Treatment Plan, and you don’t need a formal diagnosis to begin. A referral from your GP or psychiatrist is only needed if you want to claim a Medicare rebate. Without one, sessions are privately billed. See current session fees.
It focuses on the emotional patterns, relationships, and experiences that shape how you think, feel, and relate, including material that sits outside immediate awareness. Rather than concentrating only on symptoms, it explores what underlies them, with the aim of developing self-understanding that supports lasting change.
Yes. Psychodynamic therapy can be a useful way of working with both anxiety and depression, particularly when they feel longstanding or keep returning. Rather than focusing only on managing symptoms, it explores the experiences and patterns that may be contributing to them. You can read more on the anxiety treatment and depression treatment pages.
Yes, this is one of the areas the approach is especially suited to. Psychodynamic therapy is particularly interested in the tendency to repeat familiar relational patterns that may have their roots in earlier experiences, and in how those patterns can be noticed and understood, including as they emerge within therapy itself. Read more about relationship challenges.
Alicia generally suggests beginning with weekly or fortnightly sessions where possible, as regular attendance supports continuity and the depth of the work. As therapy progresses, frequency can be reviewed and adjusted depending on your circumstances and needs.
Psychodynamic therapy is, at its heart, an invitation to understand yourself more fully; not to be handed a set of techniques, but to make sense of the patterns, feelings, and experiences that have shaped you, with someone whose attention is entirely on that work.
The free 15-minute phone call is a straightforward first step.
The information below outlines what therapy involves, how telehealth sessions work, and practical details regarding fees and Medicare rebates.
Learn about how a range of mental health issues can be treated with psychodynamic therapy.
Access therapy without leaving home. Learn what to expect from beginning telehealth therapy.
Medicare rebates available for eligible patients. A referral from your GP or psychiatrist is required.