Written by Maria Boncyk, LCSW | Reviewed July 2026
This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional mental health advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, please contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988.
Psychodynamic therapy is a depth-oriented approach that uncovers how unconscious patterns and early experiences shape present-day struggles. Maria Boncyk, LCSW integrates psychodynamic work, including object relations, into virtual therapy for teens and adults across New York and Massachusetts. A free 25-minute consultation begins the process.
What Psychodynamic Therapy Is, Without the Jargon
Psychodynamic therapy rests on an idea that sounds obvious once stated plainly: much of what drives us operates outside our awareness. Not in a mystical sense, but in the ordinary sense that you did not consciously choose your gut reactions, your type in partners, the voice of your inner critic, or the peculiar guilt that arrives whenever life goes too well. These were shaped early, by the emotional logic of the family you grew up in, and they run automatically until something brings them into the light. Psychodynamic work is the process of bringing them into the light. Where some therapies concentrate on managing today’s symptoms, psychodynamic therapy asks why the symptom exists at all, what the depression protects you from feeling, what the procrastination is really avoiding, whose approval the overworking is still chasing. Maria’s psychodynamic work draws particularly on object relations, a branch of the tradition holding that we internalize our earliest relationships as templates, inner working models of self and other, and then unconsciously recreate those templates in adult life. The jargon-free version: the people who raised you still live in your head, and therapy helps you renegotiate the lease.
The Evidence Base
Psychodynamic therapy sometimes carries an outdated reputation as unscientific, and the modern research record says otherwise. Meta-analyses published in leading journals, including landmark work in American Psychologist, demonstrate that psychodynamic psychotherapy produces effect sizes comparable to other evidence-based treatments for depression, anxiety, and personality-related difficulties. The most striking finding across multiple studies is that psychodynamic therapy’s benefits not only persist after treatment ends but frequently continue growing, a pattern researchers attribute to the approach building durable internal capacities rather than teaching situation-specific techniques. Research also validates its core mechanisms: gains correlate with increased insight and more flexible defensive functioning, exactly what the theory predicts. For depression in particular, and for the kind of recurring relational difficulties that resist symptom-focused treatment, the empirical case for depth-oriented work is solid and growing.
Ready to Take the First Step?
Psychodynamic Therapy sessions are held virtually, so you can meet with Maria from anywhere in New York or Massachusetts. Request a free 25-minute consultation to see if it feels like the right fit, with no commitment required.
What Sessions Look Like
A psychodynamic session with Maria is an open, exploratory conversation with a definite spine. You begin wherever the week takes you, an argument, a dream, a wave of Sunday-evening dread, and rather than rushing toward advice, the two of you follow the thread: what it connects to, what it echoes, where you have felt it before. Patterns start surfacing across seemingly unrelated stories, the same fear of being a burden appearing at work, in friendship, and in how you apologize for taking up session time. Maria is an active, warm, and direct presence, not the silent analyst of film cliché; she offers observations, connects dots, and tells you honestly what she notices, including when what she notices is happening live between the two of you. Common misconceptions deserve correcting: this is not years of lying on a couch free-associating about childhood while a therapist murmurs interesting. It is structured, collaborative depth work in weekly 50-minute virtual sessions, and within Maria’s integrated practice it operates alongside EMDR, somatic, and attachment-focused approaches, each reaching layers the others cannot, for clients anywhere in New York or Massachusetts.
Who Benefits Most
Psychodynamic therapy is the natural choice for people whose problems keep returning in new costumes, the third career that somehow reproduces the same burnout, the different partners who generate identical fights, the depression that lifts and resettles like weather. It fits those who sense their reactions are running on old programming, who catch themselves saying I know this response is out of proportion but I cannot stop it, and those who have completed skills-based therapy, benefited, and found the deeper current untouched. It serves high-functioning people whose success sits on top of chronic emptiness or impostor feelings, and anyone whose grief, guilt, or anger seems to belong to an older story than the one currently playing. It is less suited as a first-line approach for someone in acute crisis needing immediate stabilization, and Maria is direct about sequencing: stabilize first, then go deep. Because her practice integrates modalities, clients rarely choose between depth and symptom relief; psychodynamic understanding guides where EMDR processing and somatic work will matter most, for clients across New York and throughout Massachusetts.
How Long It Takes
Depth work asks for honest expectations. Short-term psychodynamic therapy, focused on a specific pattern or conflict, runs roughly twelve to twenty-four weekly sessions and carries solid research support at that dose. Open-ended work, suited to longstanding patterns woven through personality and relationships, typically unfolds over one to several years, with clients choosing their own endpoint as changes consolidate. What the research adds, and what makes the investment rational rather than indulgent, is the sleeper effect: psychodynamic gains tend to keep compounding after therapy ends, because the work builds a permanent capacity for self-understanding rather than a technique that fades without practice. Along the way, progress is tangible, patterns caught mid-flight, choices made from the present instead of the past, an inner critic that loses its authority, relationships selected and shaped rather than repeated. Maria reviews the arc of the work with you openly, and the first step, as with everything in her practice, is a free 25-minute consultation from anywhere in New York or Massachusetts.