Who Can Benefit from It ?

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The persons best suited to psychoanalysis are, à priori, those persons who are convinced that the anxiety, the inhibition, or the conflicts related to their private or professional lives are caused by something internal, subjective, which is, to a greater or lesser degree, enigmatic. They consequently suffer from irrational fears, obsessive doubts, physical illness without organic cause; or they live with an endless feeling of inferiority, guilt, a lack of intimacy with their close circle of loved ones, or repeated experiences of relationships doomed to failure.

But the reasons that might bring a person to consider undergoing an analysis may not be connected to specific symptoms: it may be connected to a feeling of a lack of accomplishment, or, at a moment of life crisis (mourning, marital crisis, parental trouble, professional difficulties) a need to question the course of one’s life, and to elaborate a personal history that has been obscure. A goodly number of patients look for an analyst after the failure, partial or total, of another treatment.

But whatever the reason, an analysis can not be prescribed like medicine. The desire to know oneself, the curiosity with regard to one’s psychic life must also be considered. In point of fact, only a meeting between the subject interested in analysis, and an analyst will permit the two protagonists, through the language specific to analysis, an adequate practical experience of the method. A second meeting, or perhaps several, will allow an evaluation of all that which is at stake, before undertaking such an important commitment.

It goes without saying that if this is the best procedure for determining whether or not to undertake an analysis, it is equally valid when circumstances indicate that another psychoanalytic treatment modality should be considered.