Therapy is not cheap. Philippe Jacquet would not pretend otherwise. The cost is real, and it is a genuine barrier for some people.
But there is a question worth sitting with before concluding that therapy is too expensive: how do you price your mental health?
Philippe observes, without judgment, that some of the people who tell him therapy costs too much arrive to the session with a new iPhone. They come in wearing clothing whose brand name alone costs several hundred pounds. This is their right — entirely. But it raises something worth examining. Human beings have learned, quite thoroughly, to invest in the visible, the material, the things that can be shown to the world. The invitation is to apply the same willingness to something that cannot be photographed but shapes everything: the interior life.
The person who arrives late
The person who says therapy is too expensive is sometimes also the person who arrives fifteen minutes late. In doing so, they have just made it more expensive. The session runs from its scheduled start, not from arrival.
What the cancellation fee is actually for
Cancellation fees are among the most reliably complained-about features of private therapy. They feel punitive. Understanding what they actually do changes this.
First: the practice is a group of people. A therapist’s income comes from a fixed number of sessions per week. When a session is cancelled without adequate notice, that slot cannot be filled. The therapist has reserved that time, that attention — and is not paid for it. A practice in which cancellations go unpaid is a practice that cannot sustain itself. The cancellation fee keeps the lights on for everyone else.
Second — and this is the clinical insight that matters most: patients tend to cancel precisely when they are about to hit something real.
When something painful has begun to surface — when the work is getting close to something true — the impulse to cancel is strong. It does not always feel like avoidance. It feels like a headache, a work deadline, an unavoidable commitment. But underneath, something is pulling away from the discomfort that is approaching.
They cancel. The pain temporarily recedes. They return the following week feeling better. But the raw, live material that was surfacing has dissipated. The momentum is broken. What was almost reached has to be approached again from the beginning.
The cancellation fee creates a structural counterweight to this. It makes the choice conscious. To ask: is this genuinely unavoidable, or am I moving away from something I need to stay with?
Third: the fee holds the space. The therapeutic frame — the consistency of time, place, and cost — is itself therapeutic. It signals seriousness. It creates a container within which depth is possible.
Don’t leave the room five minutes before the miracle.
What “I can’t afford it” sometimes means
When someone says I can’t afford therapy, it is worth listening to what is being said beneath the words.
On a purely financial level, it may be accurate. But often it is something else — a statement about internal resources rather than external ones. A lack of willingness to engage with oneself at a deeper level.
Philippe observes this regularly. A patient says they can no longer afford therapy. Shortly afterwards, they mention an expensive holiday they have booked. There is nothing wrong with the holiday. But on a symbolic level, something is being said: I can afford to leave my life. I cannot afford to look at it.
Twenty-five years of investment
Philippe Jacquet has been in analysis himself for over twenty-five years. Over those years, he has sacrificed a considerable number of holidays — not out of obligation, but out of understanding what genuine investment in mental health actually requires.
His experience has produced a different way of thinking about rest. Rather than working fifty weeks a year in a life that feels unsatisfying, and then escaping it for two or three weeks — the question is whether it is possible to build a life that does not need to be escaped.
A mental holiday. Not two weeks a year. Every day.
This is what sustained analytic work, over time, makes possible. Not perfection — but a relationship with one’s own interior that transforms the texture of ordinary life.
“When someone tells me they can no longer afford therapy and then books an expensive holiday, I don’t judge them. But I notice something. On a symbolic level, they are saying: I can afford to leave my life. I cannot afford to look at it. I have been in analysis for twenty-five years. I have sacrificed many holidays. What I have gained is a life I do not need to escape.” — Philippe Jacquet
Book a consultation with Philippe Jacquet — psychotherapist and Jungian analyst, London.