How Much Are You Willing to Spend?

Once you’ve decided to see a psychoanalyst, it’s worth thinking about how much time, money, and other resources you’re ready to put into these sessions.

Psychoanalysis is a long path toward understanding yourself and what’s happening in your own life. It’s a mistake to assume you’ll only be spending 1–2 hours a week on it, since the psychic work doesn’t happen only in the sessions themselves — it continues between them too. The material and themes you discuss in your sessions will keep pushing you toward reflection, toward conclusions and insights of your own. You may start having dreams unlike any you’ve had before; things may start happening that never happened before; you may start seeing certain things differently.

The question of cost matters too. What you pay per session shouldn’t be too high for you, but it shouldn’t be insignificantly low either. If you’re spending your “last penny” on therapy, you won’t be able to keep it up for long, simply because you’ll run out of money to pay with. A very high cost can lead to inflated expectations of the therapy, and, in turn, to disappointment. If you’re paying an amount that means nothing to you, you’ll gradually start to feel that this isn’t really important to you — which devalues your own work, the specialist’s work, and the therapeutic process itself.

As you begin your own analysis, be prepared for your symptoms to intensify at times — you’ll become more vividly and clearly aware of what’s happening with you, and you’ll go through an enormous range of feelings and emotions. At some point you may feel you don’t have the resources for this and want to quit, or “reasons” to interrupt the therapy may start to appear.

All of this is worth discussing with your psychoanalyst, trying to understand the real reason behind it, so you can continue on the path to knowing yourself.