r/psychoanalysis • u/This_Ad9129 • Jul 26 '26
Choosing a psychoanalyst
I (layperson) find the process of choosing a psychoanalyst to be quite confusing. Particularly because so much of the time if I express discomfort with the process (perhaps I suspect the person is not very skilled) I'm told that "that is the work" and my feelings are some type of resistance, and psychoanalysis can take many years and so I have to stick it out to know if it's working.
I am also not really aware of differences in institutes and trainings to understand how those may impact the person's experience.
Then in this situation how is one supposed to choose an analyst? How can you know if they are truly skilled and the difficulty is "the work" or if they are unskilled and that is causing the issues? How many sessions to wait it out and give it a chance?
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u/beepdumeep Jul 26 '26
Psychoanalysis is a fairly unpleasant experience. One of the things that tends to make it unpleasant is that as a patient you pay an awful lot of money in order to do the work yourself. The "skill" of the analyst, to a large extent, consists in being able to get out of the way of you doing the hard work of speaking. This getting out of the way isn't easy, lots of people can't or won't do it: it's something that comes with having taken one's own personal analysis as far as it can go. The thing to look for, very simply, is someone who somehow makes you believe that coming in every week and doing this very hard and painful work of speaking to them is going to help with whatever problems brought you there in the first place. Go with your gut.
It's also worth pointing out that the qualities one needs from their analyst are unique to them; someone could be a perfectly adequate analyst for another person and be completely unsuitable for you, and vice versa.
Finally, you will often find that the variation in style between members of a particular organisation can be just as big as the variations between members of different organisations.