Wow, what a great range of helpful responses so far! You're all giving me lots to think about for sure.

I'm definitely concerned about the dependence aspect, but that's something I could really stand to work on and look at regardless, so it goes in the plus column (while also being terrifying, of course). The payment question is significant--I'm hoping insurance won't balk too hard at 2x per week, since while I can afford to double my monthly copays and I don't have any annual visit limit to worry about, I strongly suspect my therapist's cash pay rates are out of my price range.

I'm hoping more frequent sessions help with covering more ground more deeply, since as things stand it seems like the only way for us to really delve deeply into one topic is to focus on it nearly exclusively for weeks on end. Which is sort of the approach we've been taking lately, and is helpful but feels very non-ideal. I'm not really thinking that going more often will mean I'm done with things sooner, since I see therapy as a long-haul project that I expect will be ongoing for years, but I am hoping that increasing frequency/intensity brings more of my "major issue" stuff to the forefront sooner.

I suppose it shouldn't be a huge shock that my therapist suggested this, since he's a psychoanalyst, and it makes sense that someone who sees his own therapist 4x per week would see value in having patients come in more than weekly! I'm still definitely having a lot of feelings around the possibility/risk of dependency, which I'm going to try to bring up in my session today.