ABSTRACT
The current situation leads us to revisit the muddled question of the relations between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy A first difficulty stems from the fact that the opposition between the two terms, which has a long history, is centred on two related issues:
on the one hand, it corresponds to the limit between what is or is not considered as psychoanalytic; and thus to the limit of the specific field of psychoanalytic practice;
on the other, it evokes, within this field, the difference between the analytic treatment in the strict sense (“psychoanalysis”) and what we have become accustomed to referring to as psychoanalytic psychotherapies. 1
It is difficult to treat these two limits separately because the way we establish the difference between psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy depends, to a large extent, on how we delimit the field of psychoanalytic practice.