ABSTRACT
The notion of psychotherapy is one that could fairly be called Freudian. If there are some hints to the idea of psychotherapy before Freud, they were indistinct and faint. Freud endeavoured to treat patients whose conditions required professional attention, but there was no known medical speciality or theoretical understanding that could help them. His attempts, which began with hypnosis, were the onset of such a notion. Because he called what he was doing ‘psychoanalysis’ the two terms eventually became synonyms. During the few decades during which psychotherapy and psychoanalysis meant the same thing, and before some other ways of doing psychotherapy emerged, psychoanalysts derived a great deal of pride in being the only ones who did psychotherapy. However, that pride changed into a sort of protectiveness of the term ‘psychoanalysis’ and they insisted on making it a specific and superior type of psychotherapy, distinct from all others. For a very long time, psychoanalysis was a trademark while psychotherapy was a generic term.1 The distinction psychoanalysts made with pride was due to the clear protocol of practice that was also associated with a training programme and unified standards of affiliation to an international association. Things started to change to as we now know them, and the practice of psychoanalysis has become a point of contention among psychoanalysts, both in its theoretical basis and its clinical application.
