Tiaan Landman, Counselling Psychologist

17/02/2026

My latest blog post is up! 😄 I dive into the world of psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

https://www.tiaanlandman.co.za/blog

16/02/2026

Freud’s insights into trauma, repression and the unconscious are finding new relevance and millions of followers.

16/02/2026

What is psychoanalytic psychotherapy? Learn about the 'wisdom tradition' of psychoanalysis in our latest blog post by blog post by Tee Landman. Dive into how contemporary psychoanalytic or psychodynamic psychotherapy differs from the old caricatures and why it still matters for deep, lasting change. Read more:

When most people hear the word "psychoanalysis," a very specific, almost comical image comes to mind: a silent, bearded man sitting out of sight, jotting notes on a legal pad while a patient lies on a couch, endlessly recounting grievances about their mother.As psychologist and researcher Jonathan S...

05/11/2025

04/10/2025

The Desmond Tutu Health Foundation at Groote Schuur Hospital is now providing gender-affirming care for transgender and gender diverse people. This service supports those affected by recent clinic closures and helps transition care into the public sector.

📍 Where: J52 Old Main Building, Groote Schuur Hospital, Observatory, Cape Town

📅 By appointment only – no walk-ins. Bring your ID and referral letter/folder.

📞 Call or WhatsApp Daniel at 083 562 1839 for appointments.

We’re here to support your health journey. ❤️

06/09/2025

Parents of autistic children often feel isolated, misunderstood, and unsure of their parenting decisions.

This group aims to offer a safe space where autistic parents can meet others and build a community of like-minded people.

I will facilitate this online group, providing guidance through psycho-education. But the magic really occurs when parents support one another.

For more information, reach out to Blue on 083 676 1462.

27/08/2025

Day 7: The Collective Unconscious

Carl Jung spoke of the collective unconscious as the deep layer of the psyche that holds shared images, myths, and symbols passed through generations. Unlike personal memories, these are universal patterns, what Jung called archetypes, that shape how we experience love, conflict, birth, death, and transformation.

This is a special shout-out to Dr. Philé Möller , whose work has been profoundly informed by Jungian psychoanalysis. Philé’s approach reminds us that therapy is not only about the individual, but also about the stories, ancestors, and symbols that live through us all.

When we tune into the collective unconscious, we engage with the deep currents of human experience that connect us across time and culture, an endless well of meaning that shapes the stories we tell ourselves and each other.

26/08/2025

Day 6: The Neurobiological Unconscious
When we speak of the neurobiological unconscious, we are not naming a new “theory” of the unconscious, but turning our attention to its roots in the brain and body. That is, the way unconscious life is scaffolded in the brain and body.

Thinkers like Allan Schore have mapped how right-brain processes, attachment, and early relational experiences shape the architecture of the nervous system, encoding implicit emotional memory long before language arrives. More locally, Mark Solms has brought psychoanalysis into conversation with affective neuroscience, showing how unconscious processes are not abstract ideas, but deeply embodied, wired into the very circuits that regulate emotion, motivation, and survival.

This perspective reminds us that the unconscious is not only a matter of dreams or symbols, it is also the hum of neural rhythms, the pulse of affect, the living tissue through which psyche and soma are inseparably bound.

22/08/2025

Day 5: The Dissociative Unconscious

Philip Bromberg has been an anchor in my clinical practice. His writings, like Awakening the Dreamer, The Shadow of the Tsunami, and others, are books that I return to again and again. Bromberg deepens our understanding of the dissociative states of the unconscious. This function is not simply a shutting down, but a living multiplicity, or network, of selves that both protect and fracture experience.

He reminds us that dissociation isn't merely a symptom but a necessary function of living for those who have experienced significant trauma. It is often a creative survival strategy, one that holds trauma and preserves life. In his view, the analyst’s task is to engage with these multiple self-states, helping them come into dialogue rather than exile.

22/08/2025

Day 4: The Enigmatic Unconscious

Jean Laplanche described the unconscious as enigmatic - a place where the messages of others lodge inside us, often in forms we cannot fully decode. These messages, what he called enigmatic signifiers, arrive from caregivers, culture, and the social world. They are charged with desire, but also opaque, unfinished, and beyond immediate understanding.

I was first introduced to Laplanche by and in their book Gender Without Identity, a text with grit that critically engages psychoanalytic theory and practice in working with gender (a must read for psychotherapists, activists, and anyone interested in developing a nuanced understanding of the psychoanalysis of gender).

The enigmatic unconscious reminds us that identity and desire is never fixed. We are continually shaped and reshaped by the unresolved, untranslatable messages that haunt and animate psychic life.

21/08/2025

20/08/2025

Day 3: The Relational Unconscious

The unconscious is never just “ours.” It is woven between people, shaped and reshaped in relationships. What we call the relational unconscious refers to the shared, often wordless field between patient and therapist: an intersubjective space where unconscious processes are co-constructed.

Many thinkers have deepened our understanding of this dimension: Sigmund Freud, with the earliest glimpses of unconscious transference; Sándor Ferenczi, who first emphasized mutual influence; Harry Stack Sullivan, who foregrounded interpersonal dynamics; Heinz Kohut, with his focus on empathic attunement; Stephen Mitchell and Jay Greenberg, who articulated the foundations of relational psychoanalysis; Jessica Benjamin, exploring recognition and mutuality; Lewis Aron and Philip Bromberg, who expanded the notion of multiplicity and enactment; and Emmanuel Ghent, who brought attention to surrender and intersubjectivity.

In this view, the unconscious is not a sealed vault inside the individual but a living fabric that arises between people. Our desires, defenses, and histories are always in dialogue with the unconscious of the other. Therapy, then, becomes a place where these unconscious currents can be felt, recognized, and thought about together.