Freud and Therapeutic Action Reconsidered: Current Applications

Freud aspired to develop psychoanalysis into a general science of the human mind. Even if contemporary psychoanalysts agree that in its heyday Freud's vision for psychoanalysis was overambitious, few today would argue that psychoanalysis is sufficiently known, understood, and utilized. In the eyes of the lay public, not to mention many professionals and academics trying to understand and treat mental illness, psychoanalysis is often unfamiliar, or, worse, it is misperceived as antiquated and unscientific. To counter these misperceptions, to reengage the public and the mental health community, it is important that we extend the diversity of psychoanalytic viewpoints into a more cogent body of psychoanalytic knowledge, and then find ways to demonstrate its current applications. What follows is such an effort; beginning with a classification of Freud's fundamental contributions to therapeutic action, followed by a demonstration of how this basic psychoanalytic knowledge is relevant to understanding all forms of psychotherapy, and to understanding different psychoanalysts' views of the analytic process.