ABSTRACT
In the heyday of psychoanalytic hegemony in American psychiatry and "mental health," psychoanalytic therapy was the sanctioned prescription for a significant range of ills attributed to the mind. In those bygone days, even sufferers who were neither terrifically wealthy nor themselves therapists often entered psychoanalysis. They shared the widespread cultural belief that this procedure could cure them of the neurosis that their complaints were diagnosed as expressing. For the most part, both analysts and analysands saw themselves as participants in a therapeutics that was based upon the application of a complex set of technical procedures to this end. 1 Even health insurers, increasingly the "third party" to many analytic transactions, bought this picture.
