Dr Lilienthal's psychodynamic psychotherapy is based on the psychoanalytic principles and techniques of Freud and Lacan, but is done over an agreed shorter limited time.

In many cases, the psychoanalytical talking cure must pass through the stage of transference, when the patient transfers his or her earlier psychic conflicts (those conflicts that led to his symptoms) onto the relationship between the analyst and the patient. For example, someone may transfer his or her feelings for the father onto the analyst and thus play them out in the talking cure. Once the earlier conflict is therefore re-enacted, the analyst strives to make the patient realize that he or she is hence transferring his feelings to the analyst (tries to make conscious for the patient what had formally been repressed in the unconscious); the analyst also seeks to guide the patient to an alternative, more healthy solution to the original conflict, thus leading to the removal of the symptom. This fact of transference points to an important truth about the nature of trauma: the compulsion of the human psyche to repeat traumatic events over and over again, and hence the term “repetition-compulsion”. This concept of tension has since been put into interesting use by narratologists, who have argued that narrative structure employs a similar tension between the “irritation of plot” and the pull towards the quiescence of narrative closure. Dr Lilienthal uses the ancient techniques of Plutarch, and Lucian of Samosata, to analyse client narrative.