A healing space between languages, cultures and the arts.
Schedule appointmentPsychoanalytic counselling for adults and elders, in Portuguese, Spanish, German, English and French.
Online and, in special situations, also in person.
by Rachel Engler Andalaft
“I think of the questions I didn’t ask myself before and that I ask myself now.”
In the 80s there was a lovely sticker album that collected concise definitions of love. I wouldn’t dare. Psychoanalysis, like love, doesn’t fit on a sticker.
The psychoanalytic approach behind my counselling is an immersion in oneself. It reveals what is of the other in me and, at the same time, brings out what of myself I alienate in the other.
Like a house of mirrors that turn into windows, that turn into mirrors again, and whose many reflections trace a path along which I resolve to walk a better life.
Giving words to what insists, what repeats, what produces unease or what we cannot yet name also allows another relationship with our own existence.
My counselling is therefore for those who wish to give new meaning to an unease that, deep down, feels strange and, estranged, turns intimate indeed.
Unease invades us in very different ways and does not always come with a name.
Our shadows confront us in close relationships and in the family, in conflicts at work, in experiences of displacement and belonging, in the encounter between cultures and identities, in ruptures and transformations of life, or in the repetition of situations that seem to return us always to the same place.
Even so, I forbid myself any attempt at systematisation here. Unease can also arise as an undefined feeling, a sense of not fitting in, if not as a palpable discomfort.
Our conversation begins with the context in which these feelings arise.
My work takes place mainly in online sessions, with the possibility of occasional in-person meetings in some special situations.
We meet in a first conversation of 45 minutes. In it, we can sense whether there is an affinity for working together and agree on the practical aspects of the sessions that follow.
To schedule an appointment, please contact me on WhatsApp.
I work in Portuguese, Spanish, German, English and French.
To live in another language is to be constantly searching for words. Our mother tongue holds an intimacy that is hard to translate. Some things can only be said in the language of childhood. Others become sayable only in a later language, because it leaves more distance.
So the language of the conversation does not have to be fixed. We can begin in one and change later. We can also use several side by side. This holds for people who live abroad, who are at home in multilingual families or professions, or who simply move between languages.
For people living in Europe, there is also the possibility of occasional in-person meetings. From time to time they bring the experience of shared presence into a process that can keep crossing borders.
Art, too, is a language.
A calendar of journeys, time zones and connecting flights should not stand in the way of the wish to keep going on a path of self-exploration.
Online sessions follow you wherever you are, in the language that fits at that moment. For those who move between continents, in-person meetings along the way are also possible. Mobility does not have to mean discontinuity.
In later life, building a relationship with the counselling and with the counsellor may call for other conditions of meeting. Time, space and the familiarity of the surroundings can take part in that building.
That is why I also offer longer sessions, outdoors or in a familiar place, to support the continuity of the process and to adapt it to each person’s circumstances.
Rachel Engler Andalaft
In a fog between conflicting worlds and failed communication.
For more than twenty years I have gathered experiences abroad and with personal, intercultural and identity conflicts. They show up in the wounds of private life as much as in the hierarchies of working life.
Several languages and cultures are not an extra for me, but lived experience.
After a first academic training at USP and the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, my path in psychoanalysis grew out of a deep historical-subjective working through of the arts. It is rooted in years of my own analysis.
I am currently part of the collective Kulturraum 405, where we offer listening, welcome and support to dozens of people every week.
Learning is continuous, as is any training in this field.
After theoretical training at ESPE (Instituto de Ensino Superior em Psicologia e Educação), my path continues towards German state licensing to work in the field of psychotherapy, expected in 2027. Until then I work as a psychological counsellor. Please note that my counselling is not psychotherapy and does not replace medical or psychotherapeutic treatment.
To schedule an appointment, please contact me on WhatsApp.
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