To Work in a Climate of Distrust

When I finished my training 1973 and established my private practice 1981, psychoanalysis was highly respected, especially among psychologists, but also among medical doctors in psychiatry. As a result of this common belief, the psychoanalytic institutes had many applicants for training, including medical doctors. Many patients asked for psychoanalysis or long-term psychotherapy, and in clinical practice, we benefited from this reputation. But the idealization of psychoanalysis also had negative effects, shown in an authoritarian attitude among many analysts toward candidates and colleagues as well patients.

Today the situation is different, something that is expressed in this volume by Per Einar Binder in his letter to the Between “editor tradition and change: Teaching psychoanalysis within psychology and psychiatry.” He writes:

The “soft” data of clinical experience are regarded with mistrust, and theoretical research is often regarded as mere speculation. Psychoanalysis is seen at best as unscientific, at worst as a fraud. In the present climate of evidence-based medicine and clinical psychology, psychoanalysis has got a tough match. It is mostly regarded as ineffective, time-consuming and expensive. In addition, the psychoanalytic movement is often seen as a kind of religious cult, as a group uncritically worshipping Freud and his scriptures, isolating itself from the knowledge and ideas within rest of psychology and medicine.

In many countries, the present devaluing attitude towards psychoanalysis has become a modern “narrative truth” implying that psychoanalysis, as a treatment method, is obsolete and should be replaced by modern cognitive-behavioural therapy. Zvi Lothane discusses the relation between narrative truth and historical truth in the article “Snares of seduction.” In this article, he examines the emergence of a narrative truth with reference to the relation between Sabina Spielrein and C. G. Jung. In that case, the present narrative truth indicates th