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In his paper, “The Future of Psychoanalysis” written in 1910, Freud predicted that any attempts to make psychoanalysis available to the populace as a whole would require extensive revisions in analytic practice. Apart from the few disciples of Freud who continue to be more doctrinaire than the founder of psychoanalysis, a bulk of the psychoanalytic profession have found themselves altering their techniques, if not their theories, in line with some of the new discoveries in the biochemical and behavioral fields. Moreover the demands being made on them for short-term services has engendered dissatisfaction with the classical therapeutic psychoanalytic model, and has inspired efforts to find a comprehensive psychotherapy that is better tuned to the present-day scene.
There are, however, those who believe that psychoanalysis, dealing as it does with intrapsychic structure, need not modify its objectives or methods even under changing environmental circumstances. This is because the machinery of personality and the basic constituents of character organization are presumed to retain a rigidity in the face of the most fluctuating of millieus. The determinants of behavior, being rooted in unresolved childish needs and in defenses, are supposedly so firmly set that they continue to express themselves compulsively and repetitively under the most varying environmental conditions. The basic tools for dealing with these determinants, it is alleged, remain the same and should not be diluted by concerns with sociocultural gyrations.