ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis as a profession is concerned principally with the practice of psychotherapy. Whether this is an appropriate focus has always been a source of debate. Freud himself was ambivalent on the matter, declaring in a famous letter that, 'We do analysis for two reasons: to understand the unconscious and to make a living'. Subsequent critics of psychoanalysis, particularly those writing from a philosophical or radical political perspective, have often distinguished between the strengths of psychoanalysis as a theory and its weaknesses as a mode of therapy. Russell Jacoby, a long-time critic of conformist tendencies in psychoanalysis, is a good example. Psychoanalysis is a theory of an unfree society that necessitates psychoanalysis as a therapy. For Jeffrey Masson, quoted that, the situation is equally severe: all forms of psychotherapy, but particularly psychoanalysis, are assaults on the freedom of the individual, ways of coercing people to behave according to the dictates of other people to believe things about themselves.
