ROBERT MfCHELS
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understanding. They tend to think of much of French psychoanalysis as lack–
ing that discipline. I've put in those intermediate phrases because their data
are largely secondary and I don't know how valid they are. I think that the
image of French psychoanalytic practice amongst many American analysts
who aren't directly knowledgeable is that it is the undisciplined use of
meaning, construction, symbol, interpretation, and metaphor without any
regard for the constraints of knowledge about human behavior from other
sources.
Elaine Hofttnan Baruch:
One of the sources of the antagonism towards
psychoanalysis and the terms some of us have used here is the expense of it.
Most of us can't afford it and I think that is a reason for the hostility.
Robert Michels:
This is an important point. In the last few years I have
been involved in the world of medical economics. One of the interesting
things is that the cost of psychoanalysis has increased less than the cost of
almost any other health treatment over the last thirty years. The cost of an
analytic session has gone up less than the cost of a day in the hospital, a sur–
gical procedure, or almost any other health care procedure. The difference
is that the costs of all those other things are largely concealed from the
patient while the cost of analysis is directly experienced. If you have been
in
the hospital in the last year you don't know how much it cost per day. But
you know the cost of your analytic sessions.
Some of the public's concern about the cost of personal healthcare has
been displaced to analysis. Analysts,
in
fact, make less money per hour than
almost any other physician or for that matter other equally-trained profes–
sionals
in
our society.
Peter Neubauer:
I'd like to add something about the French. I think we
should not ascribe one kind of approach to the entire French psychoanalyt–
ic community. Lebovici, for instance, would not be so close to philosophy
and language theory as some of the others are. But I wonder if one of the
misleading promises of analysis may also be connected with the expectation
that analysis can read the unconscious. That is a whole new world, this is a
new magic, a new possibility for understanding the mind. What do you have
to tell us about those things that are hidden from us, since you say we gain
an access to the conscious and pre- conscious, that leads to over-expectations,
and to disappointment.
Robert Michels:
This is, of course, Freud's understanding of some of the
antagonism towards psychoanalysis, that it has exposed and dethroned man
from one of the worlds of which he thought he was master. Not only has
