Psychoanalysis

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Psychoanalysis is an approach to understanding human psychology and behaviour. It was developed during the 1890s by Sigmund Freud. The approach can be broken down into three core elements: Analyzing how the mind works and how people think; developing theories about human behaviour based on those analyses; and using those analyses and theories as ways to develop treatments for mental illness.

[edit] The Oedipus complex

The central idea of Freud, which is maintained through more or less all subsequent psychoanalysts, is the idea of the unconscious mind, which contains desires and phobias in the form of irrational drives that the conscious mind is unaware of. Mental illnesses are generally described as being due to tension between the unconscious and conscious mind, and treatment is based on ways to reveal the contents of the unconscious to the conscious mind so that some equilibrium can be found.

Freud's notion of the Oedipus complex -- named after Sophocles' play Oedipus Rex -- was that between ages 3 and 6 all young children develop a sexual attraction to the parent of the opposite sex, which social pressures forbid them from acting on. This would then drive the children to try and behave more like the parent of the same sex while growing up, since said parent is seen as having been successful with the parent of the opposite sex. This seems to run contrary to the Westermarck effect, an instinctive aversion to sexual relations with someone you've grown up with. Steven Pinker wrote that "The idea that boys want to sleep with their mothers strikes most men as the silliest thing they have ever heard. Obviously, it did not seem so to Freud, who wrote that as a boy he once had an erotic reaction to watching his mother dressing. But Freud had a wet-nurse, and may not have experienced the early intimacy that would have tipped off his perceptual system that Mrs. Freud was his mother."

The focus on the Oedipus complex has come to define the movement, however this makes up only a fraction of the vast theoretical framework in later psychoanalysis-related works, such as those by Jacques Lacan or Slavoj Zizek. The psychoanalytic movement has become varied, commenting on areas such as art, culture and social criticism. This is in adjunct to a small group of psychotherapists who go back to Freudian theoretical frameworks. While Freud is still popularly viewed as the face of psychoanalysis, his theories in their original forms have not been current for over half a century.[1]

Often major misnomers occur when viewing modern psychoanalysis; this is due to sheer pace of theoretical and scientific research since Freud's tentative steps towards understanding the unconscious. Areas such as the Philosophy of Mind as well as linguistics have shifted emphasis towards psychoanalysis being used to understand recurring linguistic postulates and mythological repetitions across cultures; it has also increasingly been utilised for understanding the vectors of economic activity by businesses and social theorists of all types. Its everyday usage and recurring leitmotifs in marketing for example betray a constant affectation for psychoanalytic readings of situations, while at the same time looking to see where neuroscience can push boundaries.

Because the Anglo-sphere has adopted philosophical premises around Russell and Frege (commonly called the Analytic Tradition) theoretical works which stand outside traditional positivist enquiry are viewed with suspicion. However, it should be pointed out that while psychoanalysis is perhaps less rigorous, many of its adherents have much to offer scientific enquiry, particularly in areas that have been overlooked, or have taken a narrow and incomplete route to understanding them.

[edit] Criticism

Psychoanalysis has largely fallen out of favor among the more empiricist crowds, although it is still popular in much of the world, both as an element of popular culture and as an actual form of therapy. The central problem with psychoanalysis is that the unconscious is functionally a complete black box, and any claims made about it are unfalsifiable.

In the United States it is considerably more in vogue among literary studies than in actual psychological practice, and is one of the many reasons why empirical fields such as the sciences often have trouble taking the humanities seriously. Karl Popper in particular singles out psychoanalysis as an example of a field of study that is unfalsifiable and thus counted as a pseudoscience.

[edit] Footnotes

  1. Drew Westen, "The Scientific Legacy of Sigmund Freud Toward a Psychodynamically Informed Psychological Science". November 1998 Vol. 124, No. 3, 333-371
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