Psychoanalytic theory refers to the definition and dynamics of personality development which underlie and guide psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy. First laid out by Sigmund Freud, psychoanalytic theory has undergone many refinements since his work (see psychoanalysis). Psychoanalytic theory came to full prominence as a critical force in the last third of the twentieth century as part of 'the flow of critical discourse after the 1960s',[1] and in association above all with the name of Jacques Lacan. Freud ceased his analysis of the brain and his physiological studies in order to turn his focus to the study of the mind and the related psychological attributes making up the mind, something not many psychologists were willing to do. His study then included recognizing childhood events that could potentially lead to the mental functioning of adults. He examined the genetic and then the developmental aspects that made the psychoanalytic theory become what it was.[2]
Psychology Theories
Much of what we know about human thought and behavior has emerged thanks to various psychology theories. For example, behavioral theories demonstrated how conditioning can be used to learn new information and behaviors. Psychology students typically spend a great deal of time studying these different theories. Some theories have fallen out of favor, while others remain widely accepted, but all have contributed tremendously to our understanding of human thought and behavior. By learning more about these theories, you can gain a deeper and richer understanding of psychology's past, present and future.
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Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and Jacques Lacan are often treated as canonical thinkers by Lacanian psychoanalysts, although there are considerable objections to their authority, particularly from other psychoanalytical schools and feminism in particular.
Definition: The method of psychological therapy originated by Sigmund Freud in which free association, dream interpretation, and analysis of resistance and transference are used to explore repressed or unconscious impulses, anxieties, and internal conflicts, in order to free psychic energy for mature love and work. Or can be the theory of personality developed by Freud that focuses on repression and unconscious forces and includes the concepts of infantile sexuality, resistance, transference, and division of the psyche into the id, ego, and superego.
Perhaps as a result of its 'unending dependence on an idol, a logic, or a language',[3] it has been suggested that 'the Lacanian movement...was doomed to dissidence, and its whole history has been punctuated by recurrent schisms'.[4] The result has been however a fertile and disparate flowering of psychoanalytic thought within the French context.
Major thinkers within psychoanalytic theory in France include Andre Green, Maud Mannoni, Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok,[5] Claude Nachin, Serge Leclaire, Julia Kristeva,[6] Slavoj Žižek,[7] Jacques Derrida,[8] 'Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis [who] write...their own characteristically lucid account',[9] René Major, François Perrier, Luce Irigaray,[10] and Jacques-Alain Miller.[11] Their work however is anything but unitary. Derrida, for example, has remarked that virtually the entirety of Freud's metapsychology, while possessing some strategic value previously necessary to the elaboration of psychoanalysis, ought to be discarded at this point. Miller by contrast is sometimes taken as heir apparent to Lacan because of his editorship of Lacan's seminars, although his interest in analysis is more philosophical than clinical; whereas Major has questioned the complicity of clinical psychoanalysis with various forms of totalitarian government.
Some of the theoretical orientation of psychoanalysis in both German and French and, later, American contexts results in part from its separation from psychiatry and institutionalisation closer to departments of philosophy and literature (or American cultural studies programs). Psychoanalytic theory heavily influenced the work of Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, Louis Althusser, and Cathy Caruth, among others. The implications for the work of these thinkers are varied; Fanon's interests were in racial and colonial identity, whereas Marcuse and Althusser represent distinct Marxist positions that, among other things, attempt to use psychoanalysis in the study of ideology, and Caruth, coming from a background in de Manian deconstruction and working in comparative literature, has articulated notions of trauma through literary studies informed by philosophy, psychology, neurology, and Freudian and Lacanian theory. Theory can be so expansive a container as to include the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who believed psychoanalysis ultimately radically reductionist and strongly opposed the psychiatric institutions of their time.
The danger implicit in Lacan's 'grafting of an ambitious philosophy of "the human" on to an argument purporting to be a technical contribution to the study of specific mental disorders' has always been that 'the speculative welter of his own theoretical speech can easily drown out the undistinguished locutions in which ordinary human suffering finds voice'.[12] In his later years, indeed, 'Lacan seemed more interested in psychoanalytic theory than in clinical practice', particularly through his association with 'a circle of philosophers and mathematicians around his son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller'.[13] The result has been that a kind of 'militant intellectualism runs through the entire French psychoanalytic community...the problem of the philosopher manque'.[14]
At its most recondite - 'The One of meaning is not to be confused with what makes the One of the signifier...The Other is thus a dual entry matrix'[15] - Lacanianism could be considered as 'in constant danger of degenerating into intellectual games'.[16] At its most succinct - Lacan's "mathemes" - as 'Serge Leclaire, who is one of the most respected and distinguished of all French analysts, remarked...they were basically no more than "graffiti"'.[17]
At the least, however, as Lacan himself put it in the first of his Seminars to be published, 'through all the misadventures that my discourse encounters...one can say that this discourse provides an obstacle to the experience of analysis being served up to you in a completely cretinous way'.[18]
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