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Why isnt psychoanalysis so popular today?

This is a question I raised as a student so many years before and

today a student asked me the same. Over the years I had lost touch

with psychoanalysis and to keep up with the zeitgeist gone thecognitive behavioural way. Though I never truly could fully accept

that every problem arose out of faulty beliefs and a cure was

changing ones beliefs. Somehow thisto me this represented a kindof impassive indoctrinated complacency dont ask dont fight be

happy keep smiling. Conflict isnt a necessarily bad thing so why did

I have to magically and benignly make my clients problems vanish?

Someone said CBT represented a kind of dodo bird verdict; it is

always effective in treating everything. My own conflict with the

apparently empowering psychology left me disenchanted so much

so that I felt there had to be something that acknowledged the bad

bits of humanity or said things everyone was too scared to say. It

never occurred to me psychoanalysis could hold the answer.

Psychoanalysis is so much other than therapy or a school of

psychology.

Psychoanalysis as I am discovering it holds a possibility of getting

to understand the human mind, disorder, society, power

differentials. It may not be happy but it certainly is liberating. If

psychoanalysis can do so much why is it that it that it is always

sidelined or discarded as the brainchild of an old perv and his

cronies (excuse my French). Apart from the Nazibook-

burningspree, which helped partly silence Freud, there are biggerissues that need to be looked at. Psychoanalysis we were alwaystold was an expensive and lengthy process so only the rich can

afford it granted but then again there are ways to get past that

barrier if people wanted. Where there is a will theres a way right?

I guess psychoanalysis represents something that we are in denial

of. A denial of huge proportions. Now that I am sounding quite

Freudian let me go that way. I feel we as a society like to believe

that things can be made all right with a few pills and a quick dash tothe therapist. Getting to acknowledge hate, anger or just

acknowledging the dark side of human nature gets us jittery. We

have come to believe that everything negative should be banished

and the world will function well. Unfortunately that is perhaps whymost of us need to see a therapist we need to get rid of negative

feelings and as fast as we can. Its like getting rid of your shadow.

Not that I condone outbursts of anger or hatred, I feel a repressed

feeling tends to manifest itself in ways that can become ugly.

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Psychoanalysis acknowledges our collective insanity as a civilization

and does not claim to have a perfect or even an absolute cure.

Perhaps in an age where instant and permanent cures are possible

psychoanalysis seems out of place. But look at it this way

psychoanalysts dont carry the baggage of being all-powerfulall-

knowing as some of their counterparts do. A psychoanalyst treads

carefully with a client without the all-knowingdemeanour theirscientifically trained counterparts do. They acknowledge their

shortcomings, their attraction to their clients. Any therapist who did

that would have their licence revoked and become the object of

national television. For a therapist to acknowledge their own stanceas only a facilitator and the client as the best descriptor of their

problems is almost sacrilege.

Above all I think psychoanalysis holds a mirror upto our flaws, as arace and lightens the blow mental illness hits some of us with right

in the face. No one is immune all of us are living an illness called life

riddled with our own pathology. Treat one anther appears. Whowould want that ? well some of us and we enjoy our symptom

who's afraid of Sigmund Freud?