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 the
cognitive behavioural way. Though I never truly could fully accept
that every problem arose out of faulty beliefs and a cure was
changing one’s beliefs. Somehow this to me this represented a kind
of impassive indoctrinated complacency – don’t ask don’t fight be
happy keep smiling. Conflict isn’t 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 Nazi book-burning
spree, which helped partly silence Freud, there are bigger issues
that need to be looked at. Psychoanalysis we were always told 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 there’s 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 to
the 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 why
most of us need to see a therapist – we need to get rid of negative
feelings and as fast as we can. It’s 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.
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 don’t carry the baggage of being all-powerful all-
knowing as some of their counterparts do. A psychoanalyst treads
carefully with a client without the all-knowing demeanour their
scientifically 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 stance
as 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 a

race 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. Who
would want that ? well some of us and we enjoy our symptom

who's afraid of Sigmund Freud?