who's afraid of Sigmund Freud?

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 :)