Psychoanalysis as a Traditional form of Knowledge: An Inquiry into the Methods of Psychoanalysis

Many psychiatric residents and medical students, weaned on the biomedical model of knowledge-gathering, find it difficult to capture and comprehend the principles and assumptions of psychoanalysis. A similar confusion over psychoanalytic methods exists in some of our literature. This confusion ranges from how we should understand and respond to critics of psychoanalysis (both sophisticated and unsophisticated) to debates on the nature of psychoanalysis, and how we should understand the increasing number of theories in our field. The present paper surveys the methodology of psychoanalysis from the standpoint of three well articulated, competing epistemological models, called in this paper the enlightenment, post-modernism, and traditional knowledge. Neither the enlightenment nor the post-modernist model alone suffices to take the full measure of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The model of traditional knowledge, based on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre (1990) points to another means of understanding our field that complements the first two models and provides a robust framework within which to teach residents the practice of analytic psychotherapy and its value, both apart from and in concert with biological psychiatry.