ABSTRACT

Many people are confused about what a psychoanalyst is. To begin with, one might define a psychoanalyst as someone whose concern with helping others in emotional distress has led him or her to undertake extensive training in a specific method-one that emphasizes the mastery of emotional problems through understanding. The method and its theoretical basis were discovered by Sigmund Freud. But that is a very general statement. Frequently I am asked: "What is the difference between a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a psychotherapist, and a psychoanalyst?" This uncertainty is not surprising: a psychoanalyst may be a psychiatrist or a psychologist and is in almost all instances also a psychotherapist. To unravel this enigma, the easiest approach is to consider psychoanalysis as a

type of advanced training available to individuals who are already specialists in other fields. The three specialty fields from which most psychoanalysts originate are psychiatry, clinical psychology, and psychiatric social work, in that order of frequency. A rough analogy could be made to astronauts-a group of individuals who choose to add to their existing specialties a highly complex, task-focused training. Most have a background as test pilots, but some are engineers and others are medically trained or research scientists.