A Short Description of Modern Psychoanalysis
My inte
rest in the "exit-from-narcissism" stems from many years of single case study research where the dynamics of both the patient and the analyst are controlled and studied for objectivity. Freud, in his wisdom, was aware that at the time that he was writing, the neuroscience of the 19th century was not what it would become someday. In one of his major works, Freud refers to the notion that psychoanalytic subjectivity will have to do until chemistry finds the answer.
Well, fast forward to the beginning of the 21st century, and we have a neuroscience industry that is edging its way forward in the understandings that Freud had written over a century earlier as essentially metaphor.
Freud wrote 23 volumes of information that he deduced and inferred from his many dedicated hours with patients. Unfortunately for him, he did not live long enough to see the applications of his theories to so many aspects of modern society. Although we may look at Freud as antiquated, his theories served as seed for an agriculture that was to become one of the most successful industries of the 20th century--the frontiers of mental health.
I studied modern psychoanalysis at a time in human history when society was ripe for new adventures. The world of classical psychoanalysis, having produced the seeds of a multitude of human dynamic theories, came to full flourish under the direction of people like Dr Phyllis Meadow, Dr Hyman Spotnitz and the New York and Boston schools of psychoanalytic training.
What modern psychoanalysis did for human dynamics in the arena of drive theory was to open the material of the mind to the study of narcissism. Under classical psychoanalysis, the study of the human mind had been essentially confined to the neurotic conditions, that is, the conditions that were developed in the personality or the ego post acquisition of language. Modern psychoanalysis ventured forth with the study of the mind into the dimensions of "pre-verbal" conflict.
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