The Evolving and Shifting Trends in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

Psychoanalysis emerged with great difficulty and heroically survived to become, not only a foremost therapeutic instrument for mental health, but also a significant component of our culture in terms of epistemology and philosophy, and it has become one of the outstanding components of twentieth century culture. A significant number of people by now have experienced being in psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and a significantly greater number have been influenced by it without actually having been in treatment because of the enormity and depth of its spread throughout our cultural institutions and value systems. As Marshall McLuhan (1964) observed, “The medium is the message,” by which he meant that it was the fact of the creation of the printing press, not the reading of what it printed, that had such a powerful cultural impact. Further, as Heisenberg (1927, 1955, 1958, 1967, 1971) has demonstrated for sub-atomic particles, psychoanalytic observation has actually altered human behavior, psychopathological phenomenology, and the very values of our culture by virtue of its impact. At the same time, the reverse principle is also to be noted—that the very changes imposed upon the observed cause