What Is Psychoanalysis?

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Psychoanalysis has a lot in common with exposure therapy.

Exposure therapy exposes the patient to their feared stimulus in a controlled setting.

For psychoanalysis, the feared stimulus is relationships.

Sometimes I like to think about the ways that manualized therapies, such as CBT, and psychoanalysis are more similar than different. For instance, I would argue that traditional CBT is a manualized form of dynamic supportive therapy, the goals of which are to strengthen existing defenses (or “coping mechanisms”), rather than to dismantle the current set of defenses to allow for a maturation of the personality. But perhaps exposure therapy and psychoanalysis have the most in common.

In exposure therapy, a patient has a discrete issue with, for instance, a phobia or a particular set of obsessions and compulsions; the patient and therapist develop........

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