In fact, patients in psychoanalysis suffer from a wide range of significant and diagnosable disorders with almost one quarter suffering from trauma before the age of 14. Ideally, the patient and analyst decide together about the duration of the treatment. The foundation of the analytic process is the analyst's commitment to the individual needs of the person seeking help. On average, psychoanalysis takes a little more than 5 years in US, where most patients pay cost themselves because of insurance restrictions. In Ontario, Canada, where psychoanalysis is covered by insurance, the mean duration is less than 5 years.
People often seek analysis after finding other forms of brief treatment or medication unsuccessful.
Eighty-two percent of patients in psychoanalysis failed to respond to other forms of treatment. Modern science has largely failed to explain the mind, and one symptom of this failure is the persistence of psychoanalysis. Just as Henry Ford's original auto has been transformed, so have Freud's original theories of the mind been transformed and tailored to address the kinds of problems people confront today. Recently Freud has been attacked by Jeffrey Masson and others for his changed position on childhood sexual abuse. Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.