NY Times Article About Psychoanalysis in Argentina

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/world/americas/do-argentines-need-therapy-pull-up-a-couch.html?pagewanted=all

Dear Simon Romero:

Thank you for your article. It is much less judgmental about psychoanalysis than others articles written about it nowadays. It inspired me, as psychoanalyst, to write some comments that I hope are valuable to other readers:
Although it can be considered elegant to be psychoanalyzed in offices around "Plaza Freud" and “Chic” as Ms. Fenochietto said, you recognized that psychoanalysis is also massive and accessible in Argentina. As you wrote, one can bargain and get psychoanalysis in private practice for as cheap as $15 a session, and not to mention institutional or public practices exist where psychoanalytic treatments are accessible for free. I can assure you that because I am a psychoanalyst born and educated in Argentina, and practicing in Miami since 2001, and I have provided myself psychoanalytic treatment for free in extremely poor neighborhoods granted by the government or psychoanalytic non--for-profit organizations.
Regarding the length and frequency of psychoanalytic treatments, it is true that there are those which can be very long, expensive and with a high recurrence rate, but there are also those that are shorter, cheaper and only once a week too. Just to mention one example among many others, an institution named "Pausa" offers up to fifteen psychoanalytic sessions for free to people in crisis. Pausa has also published abundant material about this.
Psychoanalysis, like other treatments, can show cases where positive effects were achieved rapidly. It can also show others where they took more time to appear and also other cases where unfortunately the outcome was no good. Is this any different than other techniques? I don’t think so. This newspaper has published many articles showing the lack of effectiveness of treatments for depression, ADD and addiction, among other issues. I remember Dr. Drew saying on CNN after the tragic death of Whitney Huston that it takes at least ten years of once-a-week out-patient treatment after an in-patient treatment to affirm that a treatment of an addiction was effective.
The truth appears to be that in mental health, despite the progress made, we are far away from the precision achieved by other disciplines in other fields.
Anyway, it is clear that psychoanalysis has a marketing problem in the US, being labeled as expensive, ineffective, old and snobbish, when in reality it is not. Marketing in Argentina worked the opposite way. Psychoanalysis, generally practiced by psychologists or psychiatrists with masters level or higher and not for social workers or counselors who have BA level, is viewed with high regard by consumers in that country.

Fernando Schutt, LMHC
Psychoanalyst
Member of the Word Association of Psychoanalysis
Member of NEL Miami