ABSTRACT
The consequence has been that psychotherapy has begun to develop its own identity and is more reluctant to compare itself to the gold standard of psychoanalysis. Psychotherapy can conceive itself as being the treatment of choice for some types of patient. The reasoning behind this omission was that five times-a-week psychoanalysis, or two-or-three-times-a-week psychotherapy, prepared you automatically for once-a-week work. One result of Sigmund Freud's metaphor has meant that psychotherapy has been considered, politically, the poor man's option, and therefore, theoretically, trainings in psychotherapy have suffered from a sense of being the poor relation of psychoanalysis. In Freud's early formulations of the role of the transference, he suggested that the transference only needs interpreting if the work has got stuck. The patient and therapist, sitting face-to-face, are necessarily attending to, or being distracted by, outside events, and as a result the therapeutic work may have a tendency to be more orientated to the outside world of "problems".
