PSYCHOANALYSIS TODAY
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full-scale analysis. My impression is that this figure represents a
substantial falling off from the situation that obtained for similar
analysts twenty-five years ago. The tendency is apparent: a large part
of current analyses are conducted by the profession in order to
reproduce itself. Other influences than money are at work in this
connection, but we cannot overlook the economics of psychoanalysis
within the context of American intellectual culture.
It
has tradition–
all y been said in criticism of analysis that it could offer or afford too
little to too few; today that observation applies more closely and
uncomfortably than ever before.
Other circumstances have served less directly to weaken the hold
of psychoanalysis in quarters where it once exerted substantial
influence. Research in recent decades in the neurosciences-in
neurochemistry and neurophysiology especially-has, in conjunc–
tion with the invention of a whole new range of mood- and mind–
altering drugs, led to major changes in the practice of psychiatry and
psychotherapy. Freud had in the past made his prediction about "the
man with the syringe," and this prediction has at least in part been
fulfilled. As a corollary to this development, the movement that is
rather loosely called community psychiatry made further inroads in
what was for a time the analytic hegemony in the profession of
psychiatry. Members of this movement contended among other
things that psychoanalysis had got its priorities misordered; this
movement aimed in some of its extreme manifestations at some kind
of direct social change or action; its interventions were of a very
different kind than those ordinarily proposed by psychoanalysts.
And in the embroiled social climate of the recent past it came in-as
did drug research-for substantial funding. Finally, departments of
psychiatry have taken notice of the fact that their best residents tend
nowadays not to apply for candidacy in analytic institutes-a
distinctively altered state of affairs as compared to a generation ago.
Along with these historical changes there has developed in the
inter-years an astonishing variety of new kinds of therapies. I am not
referring to changes within psychoanalytically guided therapies–
although such changes have also occurred. I am referring to the
growth and spread of such practices as behavior modification
therapies and sex therapies, to take up only the most accessible end of
a spectrum that ranges from a variety of drug therapies, encounter
groups, marathon and weekend catharses to sensitivity training,
touching courses and feeling games, primal screaming, aggressive–
ness raising, consciousness lifting, meditations, massages and who
