The Price Of Psychotherapy. What Are We Paying For?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

During the economic crisis and the unstable financial situation in our country, the question of the cost of psychotherapy becomes very relevant.

The price of psychotherapy

Of course, at the moment of a personal or mental crisis, the question of value often fades into the background, and we are ready to act according to the principle: "I will give any money, if only it helps!" or "The more expensive the better." Often the burden of psychological problems, the feeling of "bad on all fronts" and self-doubt make a person look for the cheapest option for psychological help.

But, as a rule, such a strategy of behavior turns out to be doomed to failure because psychotherapy (psychoanalysis) is not a specific product, but a very specific service, if, of course, psychotherapy can be called a service.

In this article, we will try to figure out for what, and most importantly, how much and what a client should pay for his psychotherapy to be effective

As adults, we understand that in this world everything comes at a price, whether we like it or not. Even when we get something for free, we still have to pay extra for it with gratitude, guilt or humiliation - and it depends on who is used to paying with what. In psychoanalytic psychotherapy, it is customary to pay with money. This is due to the fact that it is extremely important that no other connections and relationships arise between the client and the psychologist, in addition to psychotherapeutic ones.

In modern psychological practice, it is accepted division of responsibility: psychologist is responsible for his qualifications, professionalism, framework and process of psychotherapy, and client - for the result, since the client himself makes a choice, makes decisions and implements or does not implement them in his life. In this regard, it is generally accepted that the client pays the psychologist or psychoanalyst for the time. On the one hand, this is correct, but nevertheless it looks somewhat formal to me.

Each client is revealed in the process of psychotherapy in his own way and requires his own level of commitment, containment (empathy), understanding and endurance. It is a myth that a psychologist can forget about a client as soon as he left the door and live as if he didn’t exist. There is such an old anecdote that all psychotherapists go to hell after death, because in their souls they collect all the hell of their clients. This is partly humor, but partly it's true. Without exposing yourself, your shoulder and your soul to a person who is really bad, it is impossible to help. Many of my colleagues can confirm that in their practice there are such clients, after which the psychologist, going home, thinks how not to hang himself …

It takes more than one hour to recover from such clients, although in appearance they can be quite nice and cheerful people, saturated with despair and hatred from the inside. Therefore, I am inclined to believe that the client should pay not only for time, but also for a place in the soul of his psychoanalyst, and the cost of seeing a psychologist should depend, among other things, on the client's personality.

In philistine circles, there is a myth that a psychologist can solve problems for a client and if he only needs to pay more, win over with a high fee, psychotherapy will immediately give relief or the desired result. But in reality this is not the case. Psychoanalyst - only a reliable guide to the world of the unconscious, which carefully brings the light of understanding into the world of internal conflicts and tensions.

The client can only go through the entire path of development and personal changes in the space of his analysis, which is a necessary condition for internal changes. (After all, it is impossible to cook soup without fire and without a saucepan. The client pays for renting a saucepan and stove).

We tend to think that by giving money to someone else, we are paying him. And this is true, the analyst lives and develops on the money received from his clients. But still, if we look deeper, we can see that gradually psychoanalysis begins to bear fruit, and our life becomes more stable, we begin to better understand ourselves, realize our desires and needs, and better establish contact with people close to us and significant to us. we become more efficient at work, getting the opportunity to earn an order of magnitude more. Based on this, it turns out that we pay ourselves, invest in ourselves, despite the fact that we give the money to our analyst. Therefore, it is important to understand that the payment is exactly the amount that you are willing to pay yourself for your work on yourself.

It is generally accepted in psychoanalysis that money is the equivalent of giving back hate. The higher the payment for psychotherapy, the more anger, anger and hatred it is possible to bring to the analyst. It is important to note that psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis is a space for exchanging hate for love. For the exchange to be equal, the client must pay money to the analyst.

One of the most important tasks of psychoanalytic psychotherapy is to help the client integrate aggression into the relationship, so that through aggression, the relationship becomes closer and more understanding. There is a saying: "The best friends are the former enemies." (They were able to find a solution to the conflict, sort out the relationship so that they became friends). Therefore, in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, the client pays for his absences. This does not allow the client to avoid the anger or resentment that arises in the process of working against the analyst, which allows him to work out these feelings and learn to withstand them.

In everyday life, the average person is not used to talking about their anger and understanding relationships. “They looked at me the wrong way, I was offended, angry” - then I simply won’t come, I won’t communicate, I won’t pick up the phone, I’ll banned, and this is already latent hatred that breaks off relations and makes a person lonely. Constant payment for your place in therapy helps to take responsibility for your life, for illness and health, for getting stuck in traffic jams and other "circumstances beyond our control."

At the end of this article, I want to say that in world psychoanalytic practice it is customary for a client to pay 25-30% of his total monthly income for a month of psychoanalysis. If the costs of psychoanalysis exceed these thirty percent, then this already interferes with the life and development of the client, but if the payment is significantly less, and this contribution is not significant for the client, then this is often fraught with devaluation of the analyst and psychoanalytic space. Indeed, scarcity, not abundance, pushes us to development, and the rejection of one quarter of our needs is precisely what stimulates internal changes.

For effective psychoanalytic work, it is important to accept the fact that the cost of psychotherapy should not be masochistic for either the client or the therapist. In the case of a masochistically low price for the therapist, the question will inevitably arise of what the psychotherapist will pay for himself, and where he will do with his dissatisfaction with the payment. This, in turn, naturally gives rise to thoughts about how effective such psychotherapy will be for the client.

But, despite the fact that payment in psychoanalysis is a tool for psychotherapy and is designed to regulate psychological nuances in a therapeutic couple, it is important not to forget that the main therapeutic factor is the psychoanalyst-client relationship, the value of honesty in which must be indisputable.