A quiet garden room in the middle of the city

Depth, with practicality

I am a British psychodynamic psychotherapist, in practice for seventeen years — the last sixteen of them in Singapore. Psychodynamic work differs from many talking therapies in that it aims at deep-seated change in personality and emotional development, alongside relieving the symptoms that brought you.

Where it helps, I combine this with cognitive behavioural therapy — practical, evidence-based strategies for unhelpful patterns of thought and behaviour. Understanding what moves beneath the surface, and having something workable to do about it, are not rivals. They belong together.

Registered with the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) and the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP).

The things people bring

The voices in the room

This way of working stands in a long tradition. If you're curious about where it comes from, these are some of the thinkers behind it — ask your AI of choice about any of them, or follow the links.

• Sigmund Freud — where the talking cure began: the discovery that what we cannot say still speaks.
• C. G. Jung — the deep structure of the psyche, and the larger life waiting past the symptom.
• Melanie Klein — the vivid inner world of earliest childhood, alive in us still.
• Donald Winnicott — the good-enough parent, play, and the true self behind the managed one.
• John Bowlby — attachment: how our first bonds become the template for every bond after.
• Wilfred Bion — containment: how one mind helps another bear what it cannot yet think.
• Ignacio Matte Blanco — the logic of the unconscious, where like things become the same thing and feeling runs to the infinite.
• Thomas Ogden — reverie: what happens in the space between two people thinking together.

Plainly stated

A first session is a conversation, not a commitment — a chance to see whether the work, and the fit, feel right.

One inquiry, different registers

Alongside the consulting room I keep a visual art practice — paintings, smoke works, folded forms — concerned with the same question from the other side: how form emerges from what is formless. The smoke drifting on this page is made the way my fumage works are made.

The art practice lives at davidrayner.art ↗

Begin with a message

A line or two about what brings you is enough. I reply personally, usually within a day or two.