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Comment by cardanome | Hacker News Reader

It is nice to see some renewed interest in psychoanalysis.

Sure, Cognitive Behavior Theory can work really well for some people but I fear the phrase "evidence based" is a bit of over-hyped in a field with a major reproducibility crisis. Again, it can be perfect for the right person but it is not a silver bullet.

Especially for some people with PTSD it might not work that well or even be contra-productive.

So if you feels like CBT is not working for you, maybe give psychoanalysis a shot. There is more to it than Freud anyway.

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There is no silver bullet, but if we're going to talk reproducibility, CBT blows any psychoanalysis-based approach out of the water, even once we account for all the outright fraud.

It's true however that psychoanalysis has evolved a lot over time and bringing it back to Freud every time is not really fair to modern approaches.

Yeah, go see psychanalysts when you have a real mental issue, give them your money, every weeks for 15 years. To 4 different ones, with only one response 'psychoanalysis is a lifelong work' when you don't see improvement.

Then, if you're lucky, you'll meet a psychiatrist, who within 5 minutes will say 'I think I know your issue, do you consent to a blood test?' and discover within half a day you're bipolar.

Too bad, your bipolarity already estranged you from your daughter and old friends. Hopefully you'll work on reconnecting since now, a real doctor actually found the issue.

Psychanalysts are crooks and are not doctors.

"You're just looking for a quick fix"

Or DBT or IFS. There's a handful out there.

DBT is basically a category of CBT. "It’s based on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), but it’s specially adapted for people who experience emotions very intensely."

This is why it's often recommended to people with PTSD who fit this (or similar) criteria, among others.

(I've never heard of IFS, but I studied in Canada so some things don't cross over.)

IFS = Internal Family Systems. I don't think it's very big at least right now. I think it's also recommended for PTSD. To me it feels more in line with psychotherapy in that it looks at root causes, whereas CBT is more of a surface level thing. DBT seems somewhere in between.

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