Psychotherapy is the systematic, structured, and organized use of a treatment relationship, to promote growth and change in the way someone experiences self and relatedness to others.  Like all teaching, you can't simply tell someone to "be" a certain way.  (Recall the old vaudeville joke, "louder and funnier!")  The therapist is like a teacher, working to enable the patient (student) to experience something  in a new way.  This is reflected in the name given to one treatment model, "cognitive-behavioral therapy,"  which (like most psychotherapies) is based on psychoanalysis.  You can't fully understand something until you have experienced it.  (That is why it's so hard to explain an experience -- whether of psychotherapy, or riding on a roller-coaster --  to someone who hasn't "been there.")

Today, I would define psychoanalysis as a systematic method for addressing impediments to internal regulation or to intense, authentic engagement with oneself or with another.  By engagement with oneself, I mean living in a way that fulfills one's personal goals and ideals.  The various psychological entities and schools of thought  all begin with  the effort to understand such problems.  For more information about psychoanalysis click here.