Psychodynamic psychotherapy emerges from psychoanalytic psychotherapy (see Abrahams and Rohleder 2021). As an institutional interaction, it is characterized by epistemic asymmetry: “the talk mainly addresses the client’s experience, which, as such, is unavailable to the therapist” (Weiste, Voutilainen and Peräkylä 2016, 646). Therapists have no direct access to the patients’ (inner) experiences but must gain sufficient insight to be able to work therapeutically. Not only do they have to respond to the patients’ narratives but they also have to transform them in different ways. This transformation helps the patients to become aware of new possibilities and to see their previously problematic experiences in a new light. Accordingly, therapists are dependent on the patients reporting their (everyday and inner) experiences. Patients, in turn, are (at least partially) unaware of emotional, motivational, and mental processes. They rely on the expertise of the therapists to point out underlying unconscious dynamics (cf. Spranz-Fogasy, Kabatnik and Nikendei 2018, 112; Weiste, Voutilainen and Peräkylä 2016, 646). “Thus, managing epistemic asymmetry […] is crucial to the process of facilitating change in psychotherapeutic interaction” (Weiste, Voutilainen and Peräkylä 2016, 646).

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