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Adam Phillips (2014) writes in his book Becoming Freud:
We spend our lives, Freud will tell us, not facing the facts, the facts of our history, in all their complication; and above all, the facts of our childhood … And to face all these improbable facts we need a different way of listening to the stories of our lives, and a different way of telling them … Psychoanalysis, which started as an improvisation in medical treatment, became at once, if not a new language, a new story about these fundamental things, and a new story about stories. For Freud the modern individual is ineluctably, compulsively a biographer and an autobiographer. (p. 6)
Freud’s project was a project of finding new ways to tell the stories of our lives, lives now understood as springing from infancy, and in seeking a model for this new way of telling, Freud also looked to the depths – seeking inspiration less frequently from the fictional artists of his day than from the dramatic writers and theorists of ancient Greece. From Aristotle he drew his concept of catharsis, which he called “abreaction,” and from Sophocles he borrowed the storyline of Oedipus, which came to infuse his theory from all directions. One might even argue that Freud’s later theory of conflict derives from Hellenistic drama, whose effects also depend upon a clash of ideologies and motives. Freud’s structural theory is essentially a dramatic theory in which the analyst discerns efforts of cooperation and antagonism between regions of the psyche. McDougall (1987) was able therefore to conceptualize Freud’s mental apparatus less as structure than stage, summed up in a phrase she made famous, “the theater of the mind.”
In the last fifty or so years, psychoanalysts have increasingly conceptualized core psychoanalytic ideas such as knowledge, reality and the self as taking shape through affectively charged interactions with other humans, rather than just in the private space of the mind. Parents participate in these shaping interaction