88

In Freud’s era, the question of the mutual responsibilities of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists was an easy matter: it was either a well-meaning neutrality, or a persuasive directiveness. In the 1970s, ideas like well-meaning neutrality or the need for personal experience entered the field of psychotherapies, separating them from their roots in hypnosis. Many psychoanalysts observe that empirical practices that go back from time immemorial in the practice of psychotherapy have taken root in psychoanalytical technique and theory. Influences between psychoanalysis and psychotherapies prove to be reciprocal. They have developed to such an extent that some psychoanalyses have become inseparable from psychotherapeutic practices. Conversely, some psychotherapies prove to be scarcely different from psychoanalysis applied to therapy. While in practice the divergence between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy has become less marked, a psychological field with vague outlines is developing. It has a political and social relevance anchored in an ever-increasing demand for psychotherapy. The most sensitive issue today concerns the role of psychotherapists. We would argue that the main divergence in the psychological field is not inherent in professional categories; rather, it separates those who are in favor of authoritarian psychotherapies based on the master-therapist’s imposition of a standardized technique (cognitive-behavioral therapists, hypnotizers, etc.) and those who rely on the demand to obtain a subjective change (psychoanalysts and relational psychotherapists). Although there is no epistemological unity in the psychological field, its actors interact with each other and we need to look beyond forms of corporatism to distinguish essential affinities and radical divergences.