Giving answers to hackneyed questions is quite a task, and yet, I will try. The first thing that comes to mind is the often heard criticism of psychoanalysis from psychologists and psychotherapists of other directions. As a rule, I hear it from patients, and its essence boils down to the following: psychoanalysts are charlatans who deliberately keep clients in therapy for a long time in order to get as much from them as possible. I hear this throughout my practice in an unchanged form, like some kind of broken record, which in itself is surprising, but let’s leave it to the conscience of those who start it, and let’s focus, perhaps, on this. What does a person really need to know if he goes to a psychoanalyst or, perhaps, is still choosing whom to go to? Let's start with commonplaces. First: psychoanalysis is long. Many people sincerely believe that it is possible to get rid of a problem, even a protracted one, or a symptom in the mythical ten times. For some reason, exactly ten. This is an effective massage of the soul fixed in time. Apparently, psychotherapy is generally viewed as the equivalent of somatic treatment with a “pill for..”, which will somehow work and everything will go away. A person imagines himself as some kind of mechanism that has been tweaked here, greased there, and everything starts moving, and, preferably, this happens without one’s own participation. This is undoubtedly very attractive to everyone who is ready to believe in a miracle. An all-powerful specialist. Into its own exceptional malleability. However, this is only an attempt to avoid reality, this time, one’s own, mental one. In short. If a person has a symptom, then the symptom has a cause in which so many things have merged and responded: developmental problems, unresponsive environment, trauma, excessive frustrations, narcissistic knockouts and you should also not forget that the result with which you come to the analyst, was formed and supported throughout your life, that this is a method of adaptation that has become ineffective, but at the very least it works and gives the feeling that up is up, and down is down, and the universe is in place. Patients of psychoanalysts are courageous people; not everyone will decide to remove from circulation, albeit a terrible, but familiar, picture of the world. This assumes that the participation of the will and active consciousness on the part of the patient is not desirable, but necessary, just like patience, because not only creative forces operate within us, but also sabotaging, destructive forces that seriously test rational knowledge and faith in our own possibilities. Any acquired forms of rational behavior and reasonable well-being can burn in this inferno. This requires work that takes time. In other words, these forms of behavior and well-being must be assimilated, and not just knowledge about them. Second: psychoanalysis is a couch and often. A couch and at least two or three times a week. Both are needed to intensify the process, and, consequently, to achieve changes more quickly. The supine position, when you cannot see the analyst, allows you to concentrate on the inner world to a greater extent than on external circumstances, allows you to notice, express and acknowledge feelings that are not encouraged by your usual environment, facilitates access to material about which the conscious part of the self may does not suspect, and again revive the matrix of the most important relationships in the process of transferring them to the analyst. Of course, the more often this happens, the more active the process, it’s like in any business. Of course, you can take a leisurely evolutionary rhythm, but within the framework of one human life this is, perhaps, very wasteful. In my opinion. And third: psychoanalysis is expensive. I was once told about a businessman who paid almost two hundred thousand rubles for a one-time consultation with a coach. One can only hope that this is some kind of exaggeration. Psychoanalysis is not absurdly expensive, but neither is it cheap, given the duration and frequency. It is also a matter of priorities, what to invest in, improving the quality of life. The man who thinks.