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Understanding the crisis: Five core issues in contemporary psychoanalysis

  • The psychoanalytic movement is experiencing a serious crisis: its scientific consensus, social standing, and impact on practice in mental health have all been steadily declining over the last decades. This unfortunate process has been variously explained in terms of prevailing hedonistic social values, the political influence of drug companies, and cuts in health-related expenditures. Following a suggestion by Garza Guerrero, we rather believe that the sources of the contemporary crisis in psychoanalysis are to be searched for within its own development and current social and cultural life. Specifically, we think psychoanalysis has failed to bring the revolutionary contribution of interpersonal and intersubjective paradigms to its fuller consequences. Here, we review five core dimensions in which such failure is particularly apparent: (1) an unwitting reliance on the medical model of mental illness; (2) an ontological, concrete understanding of unconscious processes; (3) a manifest failure to fully appreciate the role of extratransference relationships in the patient’s life; (4) a naive and idealized view of the psychoanalyst’s person and role; and (5) a marginal awareness of the impact of group-level unconscious phenomena on the social life of psychoanalytic institutions.

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Metadaten
Author:Paolo Azzone
Parent Title (English):International Forum of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 27 (No. 4, 2018), pp. 255-265.
Document Type:Articles
Language:English
Year of first Publication:2018
Release Date:2019/03/04
Format:PDF-scan upon request / PDF-Scan auf Anfrage
IdNo:Azzone_P_2018
Erich Fromm's Library and Erich Fromm Archive:Articles / Artikel
Licence (German):
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