From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Psychoanalytic theory refers to the definition
and dynamics of personality development which underlie and guide
psychoanalytic and psychodynamic
psychotherapy. First laid out by Sigmund Freud, psychoanalytic theory has
undergone many refinements since his work (see psychoanalysis).
History
[This section is in need of editing]
Sigmund
Freud, Melanie
Klein, and Jacques Lacan are often treated as
canonical thinkers by Lacanian psychoanalysts, although there are
considerable objections to their authority, particularly from other
psychoanalytical schools and feminism. Precisely in the interest of a
theoretical approach to psychoanalysis, Lacan read Freud with G. W. F. Hegel's
Phenomenology of Spirit. Major thinkers within
psychoanalytic theory in France include Nicholas Abraham,
Serge Leclaire, Julia Kristeva, Slavoj
Žižek, Jacques Derrida, Jean Laplanche,
René Major, Luce
Irigaray, and Jacques-Alain Miller; their work
is anything but unitary — Derrida, for example, has remarked that
virtually the entirety of Freud's metapsychology, while possessing
some strategic value previously necessary to the elaboration of
psychoanalysis, ought to be discarded at this point, whereas Miller
is sometimes taken as heir apparent to Lacan because of his
editorship of Lacan's seminars, his interest in analysis is even
more philosophical than clinical, whereas Major has questioned the
complicity of clinical psychoanalysis with various forms of
totalitarian government.
Some of the theoretical orientation of psychoanalyss in both
German and French and, later, American contexts results in part
from its separation from psychiatry and institutionalisation closer
to departments of philosophy and literature (or American
cultural studies programs). Psychoanalytic theory heavily
influenced the work of Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, Louis
Althusser, and Cathy Caruth, among others. The
implications for these is exemplary in their dispersion; Fanon's
interests were in racial and colonial identity, whereas Marcuse and
represent distinct Marxist positions that, among other things,
attempt to use psychoanalysis in the study of ideology, whereas
Caruth, coming from a background in de Manian deconstruction and working in
comparative literature, has articulated notions of trauma through literary studies
informed by philosophy, psychology, neurology, and Freudian and
Lacanian theory. Theory can be so expansive a container as to
include the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, who believed psychoanalysis ultimately radically
reductionist and strongly opposed the psychiatric institutions of
their time.
Psychoanalytic theory sometimes heavily informs gender studies
and queer
theory.
Further
reading
Books
- Laplanche,
J. & Pontalis, J. B. (1974). The Language of
Psycho-Analysis, Edited by W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN
0-393-01105-4
Online papers about
psychoanalytic theory
- Benjamin, J. (1995).
Recognition and destruction: An outline of
intersubjectivity
- Boesky, D. (2005).
Psychoanalytic controversies contextualized
- Boston Process of Change Study
Group. (2005). The "something more" than interpretation
- Brenner, C. (1992). The mind
as conflict and compromise formation
- Eagle, M. (1984).
Developmental deficit versus dynamic conflict
- Gill, M. (1984).
Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy: A revision
- Kernberg, O. (2000).
Psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic psychotherapy and supportive
psychotherapy: contemporary controversies
- Mitchell, Stephen A. (1984).
Object relations theories and the developmental tilt
- Rubinstein, B. (1975). On the
clinical psychoanalytic theory and its role in the inference and
confirmation of particular clinical hypotheses
- Schwartz, W. (2001) Ordinary
Language Essentials of Clinical Psychoanalytic Theory
See also
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