Who Can Benefit from Psychoanalysis?

The best way to discover if psychoanalysis would be of benefit is to seek a consultation with a psychoanalyst. Psychoanalysis is a highly individualized treatment that optimistically relies on the person's innate potential for self healing and growth. To undergo psychoanalysis, a person must have demonstrated some ability to achieve some important satisfaction in life, and to have a sufficiently stable lifestyle to meet the requirements of the treatment process. This person may have already achieved important satisfactions -with friends, in marriage, in work, or through special interests and hobbies.

Despite such achievements, a person seeking psychoanalysis can have significant symptoms, which may include: depression or anxiety, sexual incapacities, or physical symptoms without any demonstrable underlying physical cause. The person may be plagued by private rituals or compulsions or repetitive thoughts of which no one else is aware. Another may live a constricted life of isolation and loneliness, incapable of feeling close to anyone. A victim of childhood sexual abuse might suffer from an inability to trust others. Some people come to analysis because of repeated failures in work or in love, brought about not by chance but by self- destructive patterns of behaviour. Others seek analysis because their way of being restricts choices and the opportunity for pleasures. Some people seek psychoanalytic treatment because other approaches have not resolved psychological problems, or only temporarily so.

Whatever the problem a thorough evaluation is required to determine if psychoanalysis is properly indicated. Sometimes, the evaluation takes place over a short series of interviews thereby permitting the person and the analyst some experience of each other within the therapeutic setting.