Word: freud
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...only did Beck reject Freud's idea of the unconscious self, but he also abandoned the formal reserve of the classic Freudian analyst. Freud believed the analyst should be as neutral and silent as possible. That way, Freud theorized, the patient can project personalities from his or her past onto the analyst and relive past conflicts right there on the couch. Freud called this process "transference." Beck and his followers aren't interested in transference. Instead cognitive therapists talk back to their patients, pointing out their misconceptions and advising them on how to see their lives more clearly...
...psychoanalysis compete with that? Freud's methods may be intellectually exciting, but they're slow and largely unproven. A course of cognitive therapy can take as little as six to eight sessions to finish; a course of analysis often takes five to 10 years. Even its supporters admit there are few clinical studies to show that psychoanalysis actually works. After all, they argue, the ultimate goal of psychoanalysis is deeper self-understanding, and how can you demonstrate that with a study...
That's how Freud has gone from being the founding father of psychotherapy to a poor, eccentric cousin on the fringes of psychotherapeutic practice. "Classical analysis is a very, very small percentage of what is practiced in this country," says Dr. T. Byram Karasu, editor in chief of the American Journal of Psychotherapy. "It's almost a negligible fraction." Judith Beck believes psychoanalysis will die out in our lifetime. "Managed-care companies and insurance companies," she says, "are finally waking up and looking at research, and finding that it's not effective." Practically the only place patients actually lie down...
...hope of finding a place in modern mental-health care, however, its practitioners are trying to change with the times. One way they're doing that is by dropping the austere, formal pose of the classic Freudian analyst. "The image of Sigmund Freud sitting there smoking on his pipe is nothing like the modern 21st century analyst," says Kerry Sulkowicz, chairman of the committee on public information at the American Psychoanalytic Association. In modern psychoanalysis, that formal reserve is disappearing, and the analyst's personality comes much more into play in treatment. "The process is far more transparent today," says...
...common." Many psychoanalysts also offer patients a treatment known as psychodynamic therapy, which requires less of a time commitment. It's like psychoanalysis lite: the same techniques are used, but the patient comes for only one or two sessions a week. "The current state of psychoanalysis is such that Freud would probably not recognize it," says Gabbard...