Psychoanalysis and Society: Which Leads, Which Follows?

In recent years dire predictions have been made about the future and futility of psychoanalysis. This has been disturbing to one who has spent years learning the discipline of psychoanalysis, enjoying its practice, and witnessing its fertility. After all that time and effort, was one going to be thrust out of one's place in society, one's contribution flushed away as waste, even regarded as another pollutant? Was society going to disregard good efforts much as patients often note their failures more than their achievements?

When one is confronted with such questions and spectres looming on the horizon, there are three possibilities at the onset: (1) run into a corner to hole in and hold out; (2) jump on the very next bandwagon hell-bent for anywhere; (3) or confront the issues and try to know the nature of what one is dealing with before taking any action. The first possibility elicits fear, and the second points to ultimate impoverishment and destruction in the power struggles that take place there. The third evokes hope.

Therefore, when confronted with the cries of “Down with psychoanalysis” that had begun to be heard (but may already be lessening), I had to raise the question of the nature of the problem. Why is what had been of such obvious importance to twentieth-century society now in a worse position than a defeated candidate after an election? At least the defeated one is just forgotten; in the case of psychoanalysis, people were staying around to knock it.

The similarity between the incipient fate of psychoanalysis and that of religion and monarchies is striking. What were the interdigitating dynamics of the rise and fall of societal leaders? What do people do with and for fallen leaders? What makes for a loss or shift of leadership from the leader to the former followers? I formulated the question: psychoanalysis and society-which leads, which follows? In trying to answer that question, one can focus on some of the reasons for the alternating rise and fall, t