Hey, Phoboxyl! You're damn right! Most of the therapists aren't up to the problems presented by their patients. On the other hand, I don't agree at all that psychoanalysis is "a load of crap." I've never been in fullscale psychoanalysis (five days a week for years), because I could never afford it. At the same time I'm not unhappy about that because I have the strong feeling that until within the past twenty years standard psychoanalytic doctrine would never have made room for such as me. I grew up with "Stalinist" Freudians (seriously, they had to quote Freud on every page of their articles) and believe me, no one needs them.

And no, I'm not at all in favor of exposure therapy for whoever may be in my situation. I've tried exposure therapy on my own and with therapists for over forty years. Without the insights provided by psychoanalytic psychotherapy it just doesn't work at all. For me. Perhaps for others it does work. More power to them! There are others like myself, though, for whom it's a complete waste of time.

Why? I don't know. Maybe some problems are more deepseated than others. Maybe if your very basic attachment issues, going back to when you were one or two years old, were serious enough, exposure therapy just doesn't work. Who am I to know? All I can tell you is that for me exposure therapy has been tried over and over again, with therapists and without, and for me it's been a complete waste of time. Won't do it again.

Which is not to say I won't test myself after every apparently successful bout of insight therapy. That's fine. But just submitting to the incredible suffering of exposure therapy! Forget it. Take care!