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A Psychologist's Thoughts on Clinical Practice, Behavior, and Life

Classical Psychoanalytic Treatment Today

Classical psychoanalytic treatment, which utilizes long-term multiple sessions a week while lying on the couch, has declined since the 1970s. There are a dearth of analytic patients many of whom now receive treatment modifications that embrace the basic psychoanalytic concepts of resistance and transference and the unconscious but also the later developments of Kernberg and Masterson and Guntrip and Mahler and others who emphasize the critical importance of early infancy and toddler interaction with their mothering figure to the development of psychopathology, there not having been a "good enough" parenting. Harry Stack Sullivan, with his Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, is important too for, as has been said, all clinicians today are Sullivanian since they accept the importance to development of their patient's interpersonal relations. Sullivan died before the later (1960s and thereafter) treatment advances.

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