A Brief Discussion on Frequency of Sessions and its Impact upon Psychoanalytic Treatment

Practical issues have never received much attention in psychoanalytic dialogue. Factors such as fee (Eissler, 1974), policies regarding cancellation, use of the couch, and frequency of sessions, concerns that even the most experienced analyst must confront with varying degrees of aptitude, escape the theoretical scalpel. Because these issues impinge on the technique and methods of psychoanalysis, and many an analysis has foundered because of them, we may well query why there has been so little discourse on these issues. We may venture a tentative speculation that such issues pale before more pressing concerns regarding transference, countertransference, defense, resistance, and the role of interpretation. Or we may suggest that such mundane factors require no more than passing reference. Whatever the reasons for their neglect, some discussion is in order.

In this article I do not intend to examine all of these issues, but rather to discuss only session frequency and its relationship to psychoanalytic methodology. A similar investigation of the other parameters mentioned would be useful. I focus first on the implications of session frequency in the light of the fact that even at the inception of psychoanalysis, when a six-day a week frequency was established, Freud never provided an explicit reason for this specification. Similarly, during the century or so of practice, the normative frequency of sessions for an analysis has