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Dear Editor,
Wallerstein (2012) provides an excellent portrayal of the history of psychoanalysis as it appears from the perspective of someone situated within American Psychiatry and the American Psychoanalytic Association. As a psychology professor, analytically trained outside of the American Psychoanalytic Association, I can provide a somewhat different perspective of the challenge that contemporary scientific psychology poses to psychoanalysis as a theory of mind and as a method of treatment.
Wallerstein (2012) provided this characterization of the two psychological paradigms with which psychoanalysis competes: “The first is the learning-theory and the stimulus-response model … and the behavior modification technologies derived from it” (p. 384-385) and “the so-called third force, the existential-phenomenological tradition” (p. 385). This characterization was certainly valid in the 1970s when I was an undergraduate psychology major. At that time, psychoanalysis was the only depth psychology that studied unconscious processes, emotional and personality development, childhood trauma, defense mechanisms, sexual fantasy life, etc. It was easy to characterize the competition as superficial, as behavioral psychology didn't address human subjectivity and existential-phenomenological approaches addressed human subjectivity but not unconscious processes. As a consequence, psychoanalysis could easily attract bright and introspective students, as the case study method seemed better suited to studying these “deeper” issues than paper and pencil self-report measures or conditioning experiments with rats and pigeons.
Times have changed and the emerging paradigm in scientific psychology is looking at the traditional sub-disciplines of academic psychology (i.e. cognitive, social, personality, & developmental psychology as well as motivation and emotion) from an evolutionary perspective that attempts to systematically establish the adaptive mental mechanisms that characterize the h