Word: freudians
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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...
...telling that to an insurance company. Another reason cognitive therapy has been so successful--Judith Beck estimates that there are 5,000 cognitive therapists nationwide--is that it's the perfect therapy for the age of managed care: quick, cheap and backed by statistics. Classical Freudian psychoanalysis demands four or five sessions a week, and a session with a qualified psychoanalyst can easily run you $125, if not twice that amount. Few insurance companies will pay for a treatment that costs $30,000 a year and has hardly any clinical outcome studies to back it up. Insurers would rather...
...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...
...school Freudian psychoanalysis has its true believers, and not all of them are doctors. Some are patients. "It's allowed me to figure out some pretty basic things about myself and why certain situations keep coming up," says a graduate student in her 30s in Brooklyn, N.Y., who went into analysis after a difficult breakup. "A lot of the jokes about analysis talk about blaming your parents, but being in analysis is more about learning to take responsibility for yourself and to take care of the people around you. That kind of control only comes from understanding your past." After...
Whatever else may have changed, the intellectual adventure of psychoanalysis, the delving into the depths, is still part of the Freudian tradition, and that's not going to disappear. Psychoanalysis is based on the fundamental belief that we aren't just a collection of neurotransmitters to be fixed with a pill, or a set of cognitive skills to be coached back into shape like a slumping quarterback. To Freudians, the mind is a complex and mysterious thing, and symptoms like depression and anxiety are the language in which deep inner conflicts express themselves. "Now most psychiatrists have scorn for psychoanalysis...