You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
One hundred years separate us from the birth of psychoanalysis, one hundred years that have seen more radical changes and innovations than any century before. Around 1900, we hoped to find fundamental keys to nature's mysteries. The intervening century, however, has shown us unlimited complexity, multi-dimensionality, and multi-interaction in every field, challenging the integrative capacity of our mind and challenging our ability to change. Psychoanalysis has resisted the process of transformation to its own detriment. One hundred years ago psychoanalysis was the youthful challenger and fought for its survival and later for its spot in the sun. Now psychoanalysis is being challenged from both within and without as being too inflexible, invalid, or lifeless.
Psychoanalysis has had from its beginning an official paradigm in addition to many straying undercurrents. For the outsider it has largely remained Freud's classic theories as they developed during his lifetime. For many insiders it has become a multi-faceted field representing many schools of thought, many innovative concepts, new building on old, new incorporating old, new discarding old—a field rich in diversity and rich in confusing contradictions. But Freud's efforts to effect something akin to patenting his inventions were all too successful. The official paradigm guarded against radical modifications and thus contained the field, hedging it in.
Counter-reactive forces arose that adopted the theme song, “Don't Fence Me In.” This battle is still going on. The protective fencing focused on the name: that is, what is allowed to be called psychoanalysis and what is not. Franz Alexander (1965), fighting this unscientific confinement, dramatically highlighted the time when our history took a wrong turn by publishing the correspondence between Freud and Bleuler, written around the year 1910. The International Psychoanalytic Society had just been created, and Freud wanted Bleuler to head the Swiss contingent. But Bl