To what extent can we reconcile some of the more obvious protests against psychoanalysis with simple shifts in jargon? Can we use semantic similarities between our language and that of the competing schools to further the integration of psychodynamic reasoning within the now necessary empirical context of academia?
Can we find a few semantic similarities between the psychodynamic interpretation of transference and the cognitive behavioral constructs of shaping and modeling? While it is evident that transference is far more complex than shaping and modeling combined, it is less evident, but true, how similar our language is in describing the mental processes intrinsic to these distinct events.
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We live in a time in which undergraduates leave their introduction to psychology courses with little more than the provocative cultural cliché—Freud has an unhealthy obsession with sex. Although psychology is still labeled a social science, increasingly its dominant schools are relishing the financial, empirical, and scholarly benefits of masking every niggling vicissitude of the mind behind the numerical parameters of a hard science. They have “operationalized” love, father, and, one might even suspect, Freud himself.
In short, we need to consider whether a strict adherence to psychoanalytic jargon doesn't ultimately limit the clinical uses of psychoanalysis and reduce it to the level of one, among too many, critical paradigms in the history of psychology. We do not want our fate to resemble that of Marxism, a critical paradigm practiced by few, and understood by fewer.
Caroline Culverhouse
Emory University Graduate Member, Undergraduate Advisory Board of the APsaA Psychoanalysis and Undergraduate Education Task Force