Psychotherapist, psychoanalyst: yet another different box?

You are beginning to grasp the nuances. Psychologist, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst… and now psychotherapist. Another title? Another subtlety? Yes. And this one is particularly interesting — because it touches directly on the question of what one does in a consulting room, and why.

The psychotherapist: a title regulated since 2010

Before 2010, anyone could call themselves a psychotherapist. The Accoyer law changed that. Today the title of psychotherapist is regulated: to obtain it, you must either be a physician, or a psychologist, or hold a specific university qualification in clinical psychopathology — with mandatory placements.

The psychotherapist uses psychotherapeutic methods to treat psychic suffering: CBT, EMDR, humanistic and systemic therapies… The central idea is therapeutic in the literal sense — the aim is wellbeing, symptom reduction, observable change.

The psychoanalyst: outside the therapeutic field… really?

This is where it becomes interesting.

Psychoanalysis is not, strictly speaking, a psychotherapy. This is not a semantic slide — it is a theoretical position. Freud himself distinguished the analytic cure from suggestion therapies. Lacan maintained and deepened this distinction.

In psychotherapy there is an objective: to feel better, to solve a problem, to reach a result. In analysis, the objective is more radical and less programmable: to allow the subject to confront his own truth. No protocol, no predefined duration, no standardised criteria of success.

Does it cure? Yes — but otherwise. And sometimes of things one had not foreseen.

So why do some psychoanalysts also call themselves psychotherapists?

Because real clinical work is more complex than administrative boxes.

Many psychoanalysts offer follow-ups that borrow from analytic logic without being analyses in the strict sense — a different rhythm, an adapted frame, complementary tools. That is not cheating. It is clinical flexibility, provided it is thought through and owned.

It is exactly in this space that I situate myself.

My position

I am a psychoanalyst — that is my training, my frame of reference, my way of thinking suffering and the subject. I am not a psychotherapist in the legal sense of the term, and I do not present myself as one.

But I integrate tools from DBT and CBT for patients who need them. Not to erase the analytic dimension, but because certain clinical situations call for a better-equipped response — a crisis, a collapse, a severe behavioural disorder.

Psychoanalysis holds the depth. Behavioural and dialectical tools work the surface, when the surface is burning.

The two do not exclude each other. They articulate — if one knows why one does what one does.