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(07/06/2016) ✕

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Despite some emphatic claims to the contrary, psychoanalysis was never simply a method for the treatment of mental disorder. Almost from its inception, psychoanalysis was – and to this day, remains – a rich and evolving approach to interdisciplinary research in the humanities and social sciences. It is also, beyond a doubt, a social movement whose growth and decline, fluctuations and internal conflicts warrant careful scrutiny and reflection in their own right, irrespective of how analytic clinicians practice their craft. This dimension of the history of psychoanalysis has traditionally been neglected by clinicians, and is often over-emphasized by critics of psychoanalysis, who sometimes study the history of the discipline in order to discredit, rather than to strengthen or improve it.

A striking feature of the psychoanalytic movement was its odd combination of revolutionary and conservative elements. On the one hand, thanks to Freud, psychoanalysts had revolutionary insights into the nature of human sexuality and psychic functioning; insights that could potentially bestow greater insight and self-knowledge, liberating patients suffering from neurotic symptoms of one sort and another. On the other hand, since the creation of the International Psychoanalytic Association, the IPA’s executive branch often greeted innovations at the level of theory or practice quite warily, being reluctant to deviate from Freud’s own ideas. Indeed, for the first half century or so after the IPA was established, fidelity to Freud was frequently invoked as a criterion of intellectual probity or worth, while disagreements with Freud on fundamental issues were interpreted as signs of resistance or of latent psychopathology. As a result, those who lacked an appropriate amount of Freud piety, or deviated too far from the prevailing consensus among the key players in Freud’s circle could find themselves excluded, or simply left of their own accord....