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Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is the tradition founded by Sigmund Freud around 1900 — at once a theory of the unconscious mind, a clinical method for treating its disorders, and a vast intellectual movement that reshaped twentieth-century thought. It was never a single doctrine. From its first decade it split, and after Freud it developed into a family of schools that share his founding insights while disagreeing fundamentally on their weight and meaning. This page treats the field as a whole — its development, its schools, its institutions, and its contested reception; the founders’ own work is held on their person pages.

The founding inheritance

The detail of Freud’s apparatus belongs to his page; what every later school inherits, departs from, or defends can be put briefly. Psychoanalysis begins from the dynamic unconscious — the claim that much of mental life proceeds outside awareness yet shapes thought, feeling, and conduct — and from psychic determinism, that mental events are caused rather than random and so can be interpreted. Around these stand repression and the defences, the structural model of id, ego, and superego, and a clinical practice built on free association, transference, and the reading of resistance. What unites the tradition is this inheritance; what divides it is the relative primacy each school grants to drive, to relationship, to language, or to the self.

The movement also fractured early. Alfred Adler broke away in 1911 over the primacy of sexuality, founding his own individual psychology; Carl Jung’s split, formalised in 1913, broke over the libido and the collective unconscious and founded analytical psychology — a distinct tradition with its own history and schools, named here as a parting of ways rather than developed as doctrine.

The schools

Ego psychology. Emerging from Anna Freud’s work on the defences and given full statement in Heinz Hartmann’s idea of a “conflict-free sphere,” ego psychology repositioned the ego as an autonomous, adaptive agency rather than a servant of the id. The analytic task shifts from excavating repressed wishes toward understanding the ego’s defences and adaptations; character is read as a structure of defences. It dominated American psychoanalytic training from the 1950s, at the cost — its later critics held — of the emphasis on unconscious conflict and desire that marked Freud’s own work.

Object relations. Beginning with Melanie Klein’s recasting of psychic life into earliest infancy, this British-centred school holds that the psyche is organised around internal representations of people (objects), not primarily around drives seeking discharge — libido, in Fairbairn’s phrase, is object-seeking, not pleasure-seeking. Klein’s paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions describe primitive splitting and its integration; Winnicott’s transitional object and potential space brought play and the imagination into analysis; Bion’s container/contained described how an infant’s unbearable experience is metabolised by another and returned bearable. The Controversial Discussions (1941–45) between Kleinians and Anna Freud’s followers split the British Psychoanalytical Society into three groups. Object relations turned the field toward infancy and real relationship, and seeded both attachment theory and infant observation.

Self psychology. Heinz Kohut took narcissism not as pathology but as a line of development in its own right. The selfobject — another experienced as part of oneself — reframes therapy as the restoration of a coherent self through empathic attunement rather than the resolution of conflict, and makes empathy the primary instrument of understanding. Small in numbers, it shaped the later relational emphasis on attunement and the analytic relationship.

Lacanian psychoanalysis. Jacques Lacan’s declared “return to Freud” read him through structural linguistics and Hegelian dialectic, producing a theory sharply at odds with ego psychology and object relations. For Lacan the unconscious is structured like a language, and the subject is not a unified agent but an effect of entry into the symbolic order. His key terms: the mirror stage, in which the ego forms through identification with an image; the three registers of the imaginary (images and identification), the symbolic (language, law, difference), and the real (what escapes symbolisation and returns); and the objet petit a, the lost object that can never be recovered and so sustains desire. Analysis becomes the tracing of how language splits and displaces the subject, not the strengthening of the ego. The French movement fragmented repeatedly — through Lacan’s successive breaks with the institutions, his founding of the École Freudienne de Paris and its later dissolution, and his insistence on the variable-length “short session” as a deliberate rupture with standardised practice. Julia Kristeva’s work on the semiotic — a pre-symbolic, rhythmic, maternal dimension beneath symbolic language — extended the linguistic turn toward the body and aesthetics. Lacan’s influence on continental philosophy, literary theory, and film studies has been far larger than his influence on clinical practice, a disparity that is itself a fact about the field.

Attachment theory. John Bowlby began within object relations but broke decisively toward ethology and observable behaviour. The attachment system is an evolved set of bonding behaviours; security rests on reliable responsiveness rather than fantasy, and Mary Ainsworth’s “strange situation” yielded the secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganised classifications. The shift from interpretation to observation made attachment theory the most empirically successful descendant of psychoanalysis — the foundation of much developmental psychology — and, strictly, no longer psychoanalytic.

Relational psychoanalysis. The “two-person turn,” chiefly North American, takes the analytic relationship itself as constitutive rather than a stage on which transference is observed. Stephen Mitchell’s relational matrix, Daniel Stern’s implicit relational knowing, and Jessica Benjamin’s intersubjectivity and mutual recognition all reject the analyst as a blank screen: analyst and patient co-create meaning, and the analyst’s own subjectivity is in play. It has become a contemporary mainstream in American training.

Neuropsychoanalysis. A recent strand, associated with Mark Solms, that seeks to reunite psychoanalysis with neuroscience — rereading the unconscious, affect, and dreaming through the affective neuroscience of the brainstem and limbic system, and arguing that Freud was a neuroscientist ahead of his instruments. Small but vocal, it claims to restore empirical grounding; critics see a reductionism that loses the symbolic and interpretive core.

Institutions and transmission

The International Psychoanalytical Association, founded by Freud and colleagues in 1910, long served as the arbiter of legitimate training. To qualify, an analyst undergoes a personal training analysis, theoretical coursework, and supervised clinical work. The frame — the couch, the regular fifty-minute session several times a week, the analyst’s reticence — became the marker of analysis proper, the container within which transference can develop. Freud defended lay analysis by non-medical practitioners, fearing that medicalisation would biologise the theory and sever its links to the humanities; American psychoanalysis nonetheless professionalised around medical and later doctoral credentials, while the European traditions stayed more open. The IPA’s authority fractured repeatedly along the theoretical fault lines above, most dramatically in France, leaving not one psychoanalytic community but a loose confederation of schools and competing associations, each claiming fidelity to Freud or departing from him deliberately. Because the field is transmitted largely through apprenticeship — analysis, supervision, immersion in case material — rather than textbook, what psychoanalysis is in practice varies markedly between institutes.

Reception and standing

Scientific status. Karl Popper argued that psychoanalysis is unfalsifiable — any outcome can be read as confirming it — and Adolf Grünbaum pressed a sharper case that the analytic setting cannot establish the causal claims it makes, since interpretation may suggest what it claims to recover. The “Freud Wars” of the 1980s and 1990s (Masson, Crews, Sulloway) attacked Freud’s reporting and credibility. Defenders reply that psychoanalysis is a hermeneutic rather than an experimental science and should be judged accordingly, and that its broad claim — that much of mental life is unconscious and shaped by early relationship — has found indirect support in later cognitive science and neuroscience.

Efficacy. Outcome research has favoured structured, time-limited treatments such as cognitive behavioural therapy, which are easier to manualise and test; analytic therapy, often running years, has produced fewer controlled trials. The long-term studies that exist suggest analytic work is at least as effective for complex and personality-level problems, if less efficient — leaving the question of whether its slowness is a feature or a luxury unresolved.

The feminist critique and its appropriation. Freud’s doctrine of penis envy became a byword for misogyny, and his recasting of it as envy of symbolic power did not undo the charge. Yet feminist theorists reclaimed psychoanalysis as an account of how gender is inscribed rather than given: Juliet Mitchell read it as a description of patriarchy rather than a warrant for it, Luce Irigaray turned psychoanalytic theory against its own phallocentrism, Nancy Chodorow built a psychoanalytic sociology of mothering, and Jessica Benjamin worked the problem of recognition across difference. Psychoanalysis became central to feminist theory even as its clinical institutions often remained conservative.

The humanities afterlife. Psychoanalysis has influenced literary criticism, film studies, cultural theory, and continental philosophy far more than academic psychology or psychiatry. Ricoeur read it as a hermeneutics of suspicion; the Frankfurt School (Marcuse) fused it with Marx; Sartre engaged it through rejection; Deleuze and Guattari mounted a celebrated anti-psychoanalytic critique; Habermas read it as a model of self-reflective knowledge; and the Lacanian strand became foundational to film theory and cultural studies. This reach stands in contrast to its clinical standing: marginal in North American psychiatry and academic psychology, still institutionally strong in France, Germany, and Latin America, and vigorous as a psychotherapy where briefer methods have not displaced it.

Key works

See also: Freud · Jung · Ricoeur · Marcuse · Sartre · Deleuze · Structuralism · Phenomenology