A Diagnosis for Psychoanalysis in the 21^st Century: Freud as Medicine

Abstract

This paper assesses the history of psychoanalysis in the United States in order to inform a “professional memoir” of the author’s experience of analytic training in the 21^st Century. The mix of historical and personal landscapes supports a contention that there is something missing or lost in American psychoanalysis, that psychoanalysis has lost sight of the radical and subversive nature of unconscious processes. I argue that only by returning to a study of rigorous and comprehensive theory, seated in Freud’s work, can this absence be addressed.

Keywords:

• Psychoanalytic training
• psychoanalytic theory
• Freud
• the history of American psychoanalysis