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Flower, in his excellent book on The Psychology of Religion, begins the first chapter with the statement1 “definitions of psychology must express direction rather than delimitation.” He says this same principle holds true for religion. I would like to add that it holds likewise for psychoanalysis and probably for many other things besides.
Psychoanalysis began as a system of therapy. It has become, in addition, a body of thought, some say a philosophy and its unkindest critics say a cult. What psychoanalysis is will depend a great deal on who you ask, or at least its definition will. What it really is, however, can be much more truly answered by what it is doing—its tendencies, its directions. It shall be my object, in this paper, to point out what I conceive to be some of the most important of these tendencies to be emphasized in recent days.
In the first place psychoanalysis is doing for the psyche what biological thinking has done for the body through its all-inclusive concept of the organism-as-a-whole. The psyche can no longer be adequately thought of in terms of intellect, will, and affect. To be sure, there are hangovers of this way of thinking and psychoanalysis itself may have had something to do with perpetuating some of them with its emphasis upon the importance of the affect, but the general tendency of psychoanalysis is not in this direction but in the direction, if you will, of the consideration of the psyche-as-a-whole, and intellect, will and affect as only certain aspects, certain tendencies within this whole. Along with this tendency there goes the much more obvious consideration of mental mechanisms in terms of energy.