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Advances in Psychodynamic Psychiatry was developed by the editors Friedman, Alfonso, and Downey to bring together into a single volume some of the most important papers published in Psychodynamic Psychiatry since its inception in 2012. Although the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry had always published a journal, in 2012, Psychodynamic Psychiatry was conceived to address the most current clinical and science-based writing about psychodynamic psychiatry—its foundations, its applications, and the studies that have been done to understand how it works.
For many years, writings about psychoanalysis—one of the bases of psychodynamic psychiatry but only one of the four, the others being psychiatry, academic psychology, and neuroscience—had focused on the history of the ideas of the different theorists in psychoanalysis beginning with Freud but including many followers and intellectual adversaries. There was extensive argument about which aspects of psychoanalytic thinking were most useful, most true. While key ideas of psychoanalysis such as the importance of childhood experiences for life-long development, the importance of the unconscious mind, and the value of transference and counter-transference to understand patients in the clinical situation retained their key utility, the field spent little time investigating the scientific basis of psychodynamic thinking. To this day, many books about psychoanalytic theory confuse the reader because of the unacknowledged controversies between practitioners of the different psychoanalytic schools.
Psychodynamic Psychiatry was intended to address this problem. The articles come from thinkers of a variety of psychoanalytic and academic psychiatry backgrounds. The topics are up to date, as are the references. Our goal in publishing the journal, with the support of The American Academy of Psychodynamic Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis, was to bring attention to current ideas about psychodynamic psychiatry—what it is