Teaching for survival

An earthquake runs through the psychotherapeutic professions (Neimeyer & Taylor, 2014). Since the 1980s, psychoanalysis has lost its leading position in clinical psychotherapy and its discursive leadership (Stepansky, 2009). University chairs and professorships, once long held by prominent psychoanalysts, are now held either by clinical psychologists with a cognitive-behavioral orientation, or by neuro-scientists who are far away from theoretical positions held by the representatives of neuropsychoanalysis. Public interest and belief in psychoanalytic interpretations has decreased rapidly, even though psychoanalytic discourse particles are shattered through many public utterances. A discipline that once inspired whole artistic movements, like surrealism, is now, if not ridiculed, mostly limited to partial usage without any clear reference – ranging from the dual-process theory in social psychology to the 2015 Pixar blockbuster animation Inside out. And many professional psychoanalytic practitioners seem to be unmoved by this threatening development.

However, this bleak picture is less uniform than it may seem. There are waves of encouragement running counter to these pessimistic threads. Recent research efforts have demonstrated the efficacy and effectiveness of psychoanalytic treatments for many clinical disorders, which has surprised even “true believers” (de Maat et al., 2013; Leichsenring et al., 2016; Shedler, 2012). It has been shown that psychoanalytic treatments have high cost-effectiveness (Egger et al., 2016; Wiltink et al., 2016), not only in anxiety disorders, but in depression too (de Maat, Dekker, Schoevers, & de Jonghe, 2006), compared with either cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) or pharmacotherapy. Effortful years of rigorous research have paid off: they show that psychoanalysts help in many difficult treatment situations, and that their supervisory qualities are requested; and if these colleagues need support or help in personal problems, they pref