The 45-Minute Therapy ‘Hour’: A Sign of the Times?

To the Editor:

Richard A. Friedman laments the fact that a therapy “hour” is typically less than 60 minutes, suggesting that this is an ominous sign of our times (“Shrinking Hours,” Sunday Review, Oct. 13).

What is remarkable is that a typical psychotherapy session has changed little, if at all, for so long. As a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst for 25 years, I have always kept my psychotherapy sessions at 45 minutes, a time that is by and large typical of most practitioners.

In other words, despite the hyper-focus on efficiency in our culture and the devaluation of intimate conversation, given the intrusion of modern technology, psychotherapy remains an invaluable modality precisely because its practitioners value time.

What is ominous is that giving patients adequate time — within psychiatry and other branches of medicine — is increasingly rare.

LARRY S. SANDBERG
New York, Oct. 13, 2013

The writer is a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.