Psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and health services.

Abstract

In the late 1950s, at the height of the postwar boom enjoyed by psychoanalysis in the United States, a fatidical observer commented shrewdly that, Despite pretentious affirmations to the contrary the fact is that psychoanalysis, on which modern psychiatry is largely based, is in a state of virtual collapse and imminent demise.1 Twenty years later the accuracy of his prediction was publicly underwritten by a cover story in Time magazine, pointedly entitled Psychiatry on the couch.2 In efficient, plastic prose psychiatry is presented in the role of patient, with the following clinical formulation :