A Plea for the Survival of Psychoanalysis

I believe that a fundamental danger to the survival of psychoanalysis comes from the tendency to neglect the impact of so many parallel training “schools”, fostered by IPA analysts themselves, that thrive all around the world. Short-cut training is offered as well as low-frequency-session training analyses. These institutions are an unrecognized significant threat to:

1. the identity of psychoanalysis as a discipline and as a specific method and setting;
2. the minimal standards of training requirements.

Such parallel institutes based on our discipline contribute to the confusion between psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. They also foster cultural deceit of the public who do not know exactly what therapy they are getting since everything close to a “talking cure” is called “analysis”!

From:
http://www.ipa.org.uk