Psychoanalytic treatment as education.

Abstract

Inherent in the words that describe the psychoanalytic situation is the idea that the analyst exerts a therapeutic influence on his patient. This view is part of that larger perspective which regards the person seeking help as a patient suffering from a mental illness. I have commented elsewhere 9,10 on the entrapment of psychoanalysis in the semantics of medicine and shall say no more about it here. For the purposes of this essay, I shall assume that psychoanalytic treatment is best conceptualized as a form of education. The term education, however, means many things. Hence, I shall try to describe psychoanalysis as a particular kind of educational experience. The Historical Background If psychoanalysis had not been discovered by physicians working with so-called hysterical patients, the nature of the analytic process would have been formulated differently. The psychoanalytic situation was defined as a therapeutic one because Anna O.