The Culture of Being in Therapy

By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.


Some clients will say they want the magic six sessions. That’s all. They don’t want to be in therapy any longer than that. Some don’t actually come out and specify a number but by visit six they start to get itchy feet. Eventually they let you know that their thoughts are turning to leaving. Now, in one sense, this is a compliment. I have obviously done something right for them to feel good enough in themselves to want to finish their therapy. And there’s nothing wrong with feeling good. To re-find your sense of wellbeing and enjoyment is one of the goals of psychoanalytic therapy.
As long as people understand that after six sessions we have only scratched the surface. The bigger questions such as ‘how have I become this person?’, ‘why has my life taken the route it has taken?’, ‘why do I keep repeating the same patterns?’ take longer to answer.
With these kinds of questions – the backdrop to a whole range of psychical symptoms and symptomatic behaviours – the expectation of a six session cure becomes a problem. Yes, some therapies will offer the hope that your symptoms will go away if you focus exclusively and briefly on them. And, yes, some clients feel better in a short space of time just from having someone listen. If either or both of these approaches work, then fine. But the idea of the short, fast cure, alluring as it is, has led many people to miss out on the true potential of discovery, transformation, insight and self knowledge that comes from consistent, patient work in psychoanalytic therapy.

Sometimes it is the unease of clients themselves that drives this desire to cut the whole experience down to its barest minimum. The very fact of being in therapy carries a potent stigma that has a curiously reverse effect. Instead of seeing it as an activity through which they can regain control of their lives, they see it as a further sign of their weakness or hopelessness. We don’t stigmatize people who go to a gym to make their body stronger and yet we do it to people who want to make their minds stronger.
There are any number of reasons to perpetuate the myth of brevity. These range from financial (therapy costs money), through social (I’d hate my friends to know), personal (I don’t want to go to therapy) and on to the opposing theoretical perspectives that fill up our university libraries. But the fact remains that there are no quick fixes. This is something we intuitively know from many different spheres of our lives. Yet the attraction that it can somehow magically happen is a powerful idea that is hard to resist. It fits perfectly into our culture of expediency because it promises an instant rehabilitation to the norms that we must all adhere to.
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is the opposite. You could say it sees itself on the side of the human being, who is individual, different to the norm and who deserves the respect of having time and attention spent on him or her. It does not seek to patch people up, turn them around and send them back out into society to fulfil their designated roles as quickly as possible. It takes as long as it takes in order for a client to get back into the driving seat of their own lives, not into someone else’s idea of what their lives should be. If it takes six sessions or six months or six years then that’s what it takes. And for however long the client chooses to turn up, then I choose to be there too. And, no, I don’t turn away clients who only want to come for one session to test the water.