Psychoanalysis and the 21st Century: A Critique and a Vision

Abstract

The author traces a current crisis in psychoanalysis to its inwardness and insularity, which have left it insufficiently progressive in relation to cultural shifts. We must more expansively open ourselves to contemporary cultural influences and connect inclusively with wide-ranging therapeutic approaches and intercultural disciplines—the arts, humanities, and sciences. This outward-leaning orientation opens psychoanalysis to interdisciplinarity, broadens its methodological integration, and promotes its growth by positioning it in the current of progress of a variety of other disciplines and psychotherapeutic schools.

Keywords:

• psychoanalysis
• psychotherapy
• integration
• vision
• critique
• crisis

Notes

¹An analyst colleague half-jokingly said, “I favor evidence-based psychotherapy—providing that I get to choose the evidence.”

²A study by Shedler (2010) published by the American Psychological Association describes research supporting the efficacy of psychodynamic therapy, and challenges claims for the superiority of other “empirically supported” or “evidence-based” therapies.

³The reader familiar with the broader literature on psychotherapy integration, and my own earlier papers in the area, may regard this paper as an extension and update encompassing new developments and reframing that project for a more hospitable contemporary climate.

⁴I realize that an assumption I make here is ironic—that the knowledge we must draw upon from other disciplines is itself predominantly the result of an inward focus of scholarship.

⁵Because cognitive-behavior therapy and analytic therapy form very different contexts, different definitions and applications result, of course.

⁶The Society for Psychotherapy Integration (SEPI) was originally founded in North America in 1983. It now has members in more than 30 countries on six continents. However, relatively few active members appear to be American psychoanalysts.

⁷In a forthcoming publication, Kim Bernstein described the “psyche-soma-mundus,” referring to the inextricability and interpenetration of mind–body, body–world, mind–world, and vice versa.

⁸According to Fosha (2008, in K. J. Schneider, Ed.) transformance is hard-wired, overarching motivational force, operating both in development and in therapy, that strives toward maximal vitality, authenticity, and genuine contact. According to Gendlin (2004), each move, from the pumping of the heart to discussing psychoanalytic theory, implies the next step—an organic carrying forward process that, at each moment, is possible to feel. With specific training, one can learn to attend to this feeling more deeply, so that a holistic felt sense of a whole situation can form.

⁹Other approaches to psychotherapy integration are the “common factors” approach and technical eclecticism, the latter based on research evidence rather than theory. The interested reader may wish to refer to Norcross and Goldfried (2005).

¹⁰As I come to the end of this paper, I am aware I have offered a very narrow sampling of the wide range of relevant information now available to us. In the future, I hope to edit a volume compiling the psychoanalytic insights of an array of scholars from other disciplines and nonanalytic schools of psychotherapy. Their thinking, originating from beyond our traditional borders, would undoubtedly be of great value to us.