ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis emerged in the early twentieth century, initially founded by
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in Vienna, as a procedure for the investigation
of mental processes and treatment of neurotic disorders. For Freud and the
early psychoanalytic community, the procedure involved a sustained period
of, ideally, four one-hour sessions per week with a patient, sometimes
called the analysand, and the analyst, working one-to-one. Over the last
century, psychoanalytic procedure and its underlying theories have evolved
considerably into multiple strategies for the treatment of neurotic disorders:
disabling anxiety, depression, compulsive behavioral disorders, and a range of
nervous system diseases. In it, classical, Freudian pattern psychoanalysis has
been largely eclipsed by behavioral and neuropharmacological approaches.
