Editorial

Ever since my pyschoanalytic training begin in 1936, I have heard two gloomy themes: psychoanalysis is a fad (even a fraud!), and there's been nothing new since Freud. In the 1930's, neurologists and nondynamic psychiatrists railed against psychoanalysis. In the 1960's and into the 1970's, psychoanalytically trained psychiatrists, sad to say, are quite visible among the crepe hangers. I think the prophets of gloom are wrong. I think psychoanalysis is still a budding science and has a great future. I'll tell you why I think so.

Psychoanalysis began as a therapy for neuroses. It became the conceptual matrix for psychotherapies oriented toward resolving the chronic psychopathology underlying symptoms and maladaptive functioning. These therapies, variously termed reconstructive, rehabilitative, psychodynamic and so forth, include psychoanalysis, psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy, analytically oriented group therapy, family therapy, and some others. Behavioral therapists claim as their own the rapid treatment of disordered sexual responses, yet the processes involved can best be understood in the psychoanalytic terms of transference psychodynamics.

More people are in dynamically based therapies today than ten years ago and there is good reason for it. Apart from cardiovascular surgery and the still experimental transplant surgery, no procedure in medicine can resolve so much chronic psychopathology for so many as have the reconstructive psychotherapies. Psychoanalytic techniques have, of course, changed a great deal in the past 25 years and will continue to do so. The more rigid among classical psychoanalysts are diminishing in number and though their young adherents are still entrapped in metapsychology, they are either more willing to or must survey other psychoanalytic theories and techniques. Economic factors and the marked increase in the number of therapists have drastically limited the pool of patients who can afford four to five times a week visits. Consequ