Cheap and effective,CBT became the dominant form of therapy, consigning Freud to psychology’s dingy basement. But unusual studies acquire cast doubt on its supremacy – and shown dramatic results for psychoanalysis. Is it time to get back on the couch?Dr David Pollens is a psychoanalyst who sees his patients in a modest ground-floor office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and a neighbourhood probably only rivalled by the Upper West Side for the highest concentration of therapists anywhere on the planet. Pollens,who is in his early 60s, with thinning silver hair, and sits in a wooden armchair at the head of a couch; his patients lie on the couch,facing away from him, the better to explore their most embarrassing fears or fantasies. Many of them arrive several times a week, and sometimes for years,in keeping with analytic tradition. He has an impressive track record treating anxiety, depression and other disorders in adults and children, or through the medium of uncensored and largely unstructured talk.
To visit Pollens,as I did one sunless winter’s afternoon late last year, is to plunge immediately into the arcane Freudian language of “resistance” and “neurosis”, and “transference” and “counter-transference”. He exudes a sort of warm neutrality; you could easily imagine telling him your most troubling secrets. Like other members of his tribe,Pollens sees himself as an excavator of the catacombs of the unconscious: of the sexual drives that lurk beneath awareness; the hatred we feel for those we claim to worship; and the other distasteful truths about ourselves we don’t know, and often don’t wish to know.
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Source: theguardian.com