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Who Can Benefit from Psychoanalysis? Because analysis
is a highly individualized treatment, people who wish to know if they
would benefit from it should seek consultation with an experienced psychoanalyst.
Still, some generalizations can be made. The person best able to undergo
psychoanalysis is someone who, no matter how incapacitated at the time,
is basically, or potentially, a sturdy individual. This person may have
already achieved important satisfactions - with friends, in marriage,
in work, or through special interests and hobbies - but is nonetheless
significantly impaired by long-standing symptoms: depression or anxiety,
sexual incapacities, or physical symptoms without any demonstrable underlying
physical cause. One person may be plagued by private rituals or compulsions
or repetitive thoughts of which no one else is aware. Another may live
a constricted life of isolation and loneliness, incapable of feeling close
to anyone. A victim of childhood sexual abuse might suffer from an inability
to trust others. Some people come to analysis because of repeated failures
in work or in love, brought about not by chance but by self- destructive
patterns of behavior. Others need analysis because the way they are -
their character - substantially limits their choices and their pleasures.
And still others seek analysis definitively to resolve psychological problems
that were only temporarily or partially resolved by other approaches.
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