You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The advent of psychoanalysis as a theory of personality, as a research tool, and as therapy began near the close of the nineteenth century, with Freud. The historical evidence for the continuing growth of psychoanalysis has been based on early contributions and on the work of other leaders within the field of psychoanalysis who endeavored to delineate and evaluate personality and psychopathology.
For all too long, many psychoanalysts have lost sight of the thrust of the psychoanalytic movement pioneered by Freud and other eminent scholars. In no way did Freud intend to make psychoanalysis a rigid, codified science, which left little art. The very essence of Freudian psychoanalysis has always been and will always remain, an understanding of the unconscious and the interpretation of resistance and transference.1 Frequently, however, psychoanalysts have forgotten that in order to make these interpretations there must be a recognition of the impingement of the current cultural and societal milieu. Freud himself, a product of the Victorian era, was acutely aware of the repressions, inhibitions, and prohibitions that culture provided and that were expressed in the individual psychopathology.2 Had he not been able to understand the vicissitudes of man's difficulties, the evolution of our work with its attending complexities would have never been undertaken, nor would it have developed to the extent that it has today.
It has long been known that the therapeutic aim of psychoanalysis has been to free the individual from his core neurotic conflicts. Fenichel underlines the point in his definitive treatment of the theory of neurosis by saying, “There are many ways to treat neuroses, but there is only one way to understand them.”3 In this paper, I do not wish to explore theory or clinical evidence to describe what neurotic or core conflicts are, except to indicate that the psychoanalytic procedure has been based largely on a theory which included intrapersonal and cultural determ