ABSTRACT
Increasingly over the past decade, psychoanalysts have shown a willingness to believe that various aspects of psychoanalytic technique, heretofore viewed as important, if not essential, can be altered or actually even dispensed with entirely without substantially compromising treatment effects. This new flexibility is due to a variety of reasons. For example, as a consequence of strained economic circumstances, modern-day busy schedules, and competition both from pharmacological treatments and cognitive-behavioral therapies requiring less time, the frequency of sessions per week in the typical psychoanalysis has decreased. This is so clearly the trend that some training institutions even permit thrice-weekly analyses to count both for the psychoanalyses that candidates conduct and for their own required treatments (their so-called training analyses). Although most view this as less than ideal, patients and analysts have coped with the consequent decrease in intensity.
