Psychodynamic Approaches to Human Behavior

For many people, psychoanalysis conveys the image of a patient lying on a couch, speaking endlessly (that is, session after session, and for many years) about dreams and sexual fantasies to a bearded and elderly psychoanalyst who remains relatively silent, except for an occasional oracular comment known as an interpretation. For those who have been superficially exposed to Freud in undergraduate psychology courses, psychoanalysis is both a largely discredited theory of personality and form of treatment for which there is little empirical justification. Yet psychoanalytic theorizing and psychoanalytically influenced psychotherapy remain viable and continue, over a century after Freud’s first publications, to have an influence not only in psychiatry and clinical psychology but in the arts and humanities in intellectual communities throughout the world. Contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice have both changed dramatically since Freud’s death in 1939 and can no longer be considered the work of a single man. They have evolved in many different directions, some of which represent radical departures from orthodox Freudian formulations. A very small sample of psychoanalytic theorists and concepts is provided in Box 10-1. Another view of psychoanalytic theory, popular in some academic circles, considers it worthless because it is based on a biased sample (neurotic, middle class, nineteenth-century residents of Vienna) and because its concepts cannot be subjected to empirical testing. These criticisms are simplistic, and a rebuttal is beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice to make the following comments. First the history of science suggests that those theories richest in explanatory power have often proved most difficult to study empirically. Newton’s Second Law, for example, could not be demonstrated in a reliable, quantitative way for 100 years. Psychoanalytic theory is derived primarily from the experience of psychotherapy, and, in the eyes of those who have experienced it, provides a vocabulary and conceptual map for a set of experiences that are intense, highly personal, and otherwise hard to explain. Furthermore, it is not true that all the theories of Freud and his followers are untestable. Psychoanalytic hypotheses may be difficult to subject to scientific scrutiny, but the same can be said about any psychological hypotheses involving complex phenomena and worthy of being tested. Psychoanalytic ideas have possibly inspired as much empirical research as any theory in the behavioral sciencEvery man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away.