ABSTRACT
The relationship between psychoanalysis and medicine has been a continuing issue in the history of analysis. Inasmuch as psychoanalysis was considered to be a health care profession, the question of the relationship between psychoanalysis and health care, as it is being considered today, never arose in Freud's essay. Only through an ongoing review of the effects on psychoanalysis of its putative medical affiliation can we gauge the extent to which psychoanalytic thinking has been affected by largely unquestioned and unexamined medical models and practices. The organizational, political, legal, and economic benefits that accompany the designation of health care profession are many. The professional may also be sympathetic about the diagnosis, because the patient is perceived to be a “victim” of the disease process that has been visited upon her. Psychoanalysis is currently in a state of productive theoretical, conceptual, and technical ferment.
