The Changing Paradigm of Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Psychoanalysis, one hundred years after its establishment as an intellectual discipline and as a therapeutic modality, is undergoing a significant change in its theoretical framework. We are becoming increasingly aware of the ubiquity and inevitability of the mutual influence that runs through and even defines the analytic process, and we need new concepts to recognize and account for this influence. However, we must also preserve our recognition of the power of experience that is fundamentally intrapsychic and private. Some issues that emerge from our growing appreciation of the dynamic tension between the relational and the private are illustrated in a clinical example.