Sure - since talk therapy was pioneered it's vacillated wildly in approach between what we would today call depth and cognitive approaches. At times the emphasis has been entirely on teaching socialisation and behavioural strategies, at other times it's been delving into unconscious motivations. More specifically Freud (and successors, especially Anna Freud) identified a series of defence mechanisms, that have been widely validated and are now accepted far outside of analysis. Two of these are denial (literally refusal to accept or acknowledge reality) and repression.
Meanwhile Freud's developmental framework had young children going through early stages of 'opedipal' development involving attraction towards their opposite sex parent, and fantasies involving them - which would usually be repressed and could emerge as neurotic symptoms.
So you have this concept of memory as a potentially hidden repressed desire or trauma, and also this idea of attraction to the primary care giver. Psychoanalytics techniques - like hypnotism and later free association, were designed to uncover the unacceptable thoughts and primal trauma that lead to neurotic symptoms. So you have this delving for hidden desire and the one original source of trauma (this is another major issue with psychoanalysis, the idea that all trauma connects to an original primal trauma), combined with a fixation on the desire for the parent.
Over time techniques and theory have balkanised, so you have people simultaneously seeking desires in the unconscious and refusing to accept the surface level meaning of symptoms and patient communication - while simultaneously latching on to any 'recovered memory' of trauma. This contradiction can motivate patients to perform for their therapists, producing symptoms, dreams, memories etc which explain the 'origin' of issues which may have other causes - from personality disorders to physiological disease, to social contagions.
Meanwhile Freud's developmental framework had young children going through early stages of 'opedipal' development involving attraction towards their opposite sex parent, and fantasies involving them - which would usually be repressed and could emerge as neurotic symptoms.
So you have this concept of memory as a potentially hidden repressed desire or trauma, and also this idea of attraction to the primary care giver. Psychoanalytics techniques - like hypnotism and later free association, were designed to uncover the unacceptable thoughts and primal trauma that lead to neurotic symptoms. So you have this delving for hidden desire and the one original source of trauma (this is another major issue with psychoanalysis, the idea that all trauma connects to an original primal trauma), combined with a fixation on the desire for the parent.
Over time techniques and theory have balkanised, so you have people simultaneously seeking desires in the unconscious and refusing to accept the surface level meaning of symptoms and patient communication - while simultaneously latching on to any 'recovered memory' of trauma. This contradiction can motivate patients to perform for their therapists, producing symptoms, dreams, memories etc which explain the 'origin' of issues which may have other causes - from personality disorders to physiological disease, to social contagions.