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Almost from its inception, psychoanalysis has been riven by debates about the scope and applicability of its techniques, findings and understandings. At one extreme, in a trend that was common in the 1920s and 30s, psychoanalysis was thought to be not even properly a therapy for the single analysand. It was simply a research tool for systematically exploring and categorizing the workings of the Unconscious. It was a “pure science”, and any therapeutic or didactic conclusions or consequences that might be derived from it were incidental.
At the other extreme on the political left, from the 1920s onwards, psychoanalysis was thought to be the foundation for new forms of child-rearing, parenthood, education, sexual and intimate relationships and, ultimately, for the creation of new social order based on a new man, woman and child.
Freud himself swung between these various positions, torn between the siren songs of pure science and research and of widespread, almost revolutionary, possibilities of transformative change whether social or personal. And Freud’s own split was played out in the splits and conflicts within the psychoanalytic movement, in particular between those who argued that psychoanalysis had socially transformative and educational function, like Adler, Reich and Rank; and those who stuck with a strict scientific, research view of psychoanalysis, like Abraham and, at least in public, Freud himself. This split and its attendant tensions played a significant part in s
o-called “Controversial Discussions”, which rocked the British Society in the early 1940s pitting the Anna Freud against the Melanie Kleinians (c.f. (i) Louis Breger 2000. Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision. (ii) Beate Lohser & Peter Newton. 1996. Unorthodox Freud: The View From the Couch.)
Given the unmissable social and political turmoil in Europe in the 1920s and 30s, it is interesting how little interest any of the main strands of psychoanalytic thought took either in analyzing or direct