ABSTRACT
The psychodynamic approach to coaching incorporates an array of psychoanalytical insights, techniques and interventions focusing on the unconscious and its influences on human behaviour. The psychodynamic approach incorporates various psychoanalytic and psychodynamic aspects, concepts and schools of thought that have developed over the 125 years since Freud began to work on the unconscious. The dynamic aspect of the term of psychodynamics refers to processes that take place between different psychic instances. The development of psychodynamics then embraced the ego psychology first developed by Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud, who contributed the theory of ego defences dealing with inner-conflict and warding off the resulting anxiety. Contemporary psychodynamics is also informed by neuroscience, particularly neuropsychoanalysis. Psychodynamic coaching focuses on the inner-world of the client in the context of leadership roles within organisations. Psychodynamic coaching, hence, is often referred to as systems-psychodynamic coaching using the Person–Role–System model to investigate the relations, boundaries and influences between these three spheres from a psychodynamic perspective.
