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Arnold Rothstein's basic assumption is that psychoanalysis is the best form of treatment for most of the patients who seek his help; and that those who come to him want the best help he can offer even when they are reluctant to start an analysis, which he sees as part of the resistance in the early phase of the psychoanalytic process.
Rothstein does not accept for psychoanalysis those patients with serious drug or alcohol abuse, other serious psychiatric disturbances, those who have made several suicide attempts, or those who are “too disturbed and too disturbing for me” (Rothstein, 1998, p. 63). The categories of patients who are not accepted for psychoanalytic treatment are fairly well delimited. Rothstein emphasizes that these rejection criteria are personal and are related to the analyst's own experience of his or her ability or inability to work with the patient in question in analysis “at this time in our lives” (p. 111). Rothstein offers a trial of psychoanalysis. This trial analysis, which may last for two or three years, will show whether it is possible to collaborate in a standard analysis, that is, in treatment for four to five hours a week, with the analysand in the supine position.
Rothstein's article deals with the question of “changing psychotherapy into psychoanalysis,” but it in fact focuses on the author's model for the initial contact in an analysis. This model resolves the question in the title of his article, partly because such a transition—if it extends from the initial stage, with fewer hours of psychoanalysis per week, to full psychoanalysis—does not influence the basic analyzing attitude of the psychoanalyst, an attitude which, in Rothstein's