Introduction

This summer, I'm planning on spending a lot of time reading psychoanalytic theory, and I wanted to have a blog that I could use to write down my thoughts about what I'm reading.

As a bit of personal introduction, my name is Rowan, I'm a senior psychology major at Reed College. I am interested in becoming a psychoanalyst or a psychodynamic therapist in the future, although I'm not exactly sure what path I'm going to take in order to get there. Because I spent the last couple years being trained empirically in the psychology department, I'm in a very tenuous position as far as where my future education will be. Among the psychological establishment, the psychoanalytic approach has a very marginal position. However, there are some signs that psychodynamic psychotherapy (psychodynamic is, as far as I can tell, the euphemism that psychoanalytic psychologists use in order to refer to a psychoanalytic approach) is experiencing a resurgence of support within psychology (see Shedler, 2010).

In the most recent issue of Psychoanalytic Psychology, there's an article about how psychoanalysis needs to have an empirical element. In order to support this, the author talks about a psychoanalytic clinic where they were using a policy (based on their theoretical ideas) of not giving outpatient support to patients after their period of institutionalization had ended. Basically, they would kick people out onto the street thinking that it was crucial for them to stand on their own feet. I'm sure they had some kind of bullshit theoretical explanation for this. The author goes on to say that only after they ran studies comparing the different treatment approaches did they discover that their method was not effective.

My first reaction is, "You needed to run a study to figure this out?" Yes, if clinicians are running around engaging in very potentially harmful policies they should probably be grounded in empirical evidence to support their theories. But I think, quite frankly, any theory that states that this is a good approach (not just a good approach, but the right approach one hundred percent of the time) is a crappy theory, and you could probably debunk the theory on its own terms, within the context of psychoanalysis. Interestingly, also, this example that the author provides has nothing to do with the actual psychoanalytic setting -- only the trappings and policies that surround it.

Empiricism would prevent psychoanalytic clinicians from engaging in counterproductive policies based on their theoretical frameworks, but the author presents very little evidence that there is actually something to be contributed to the psychoanalytic encounter itself. Empiricism may be able to prove that psychodynamic therapy is effective (a useful endeavor, certainly!), but it doesn't seem to have done very much to aid the craft of psychoanalysis.

On the other hand, I would agree with the author that there is something ludicrous about the position taken by many psychoanalysts that psychoanalysis can only be studied from within the psychoanalytic encounter. That approach just seems potentially rife for abuse, and in a certain light it smacks of elitism and arrogance. This might just be a strawman, because most psychoanalysts that I read don't base their clinical approach solely on case studies or information gained from psychoanalysis itself. They orient themselves within psychoanalytic theory using other texts and knowledge gained from other fields. Of course, those approaches still aren't empirically based, and so they will inevitably be subject to the kinds of errors that cognitive psychology focuses on.

Basically, a large part of cognitive psychology is the study of the way that people see patterns that aren't there and generally fail at detecting causal relationships. Self-serving attributions, self-defeating thought patterns -- these phenomena aren't things that psychoanalysis is unfamiliar with, but cognitive psychology took a different step and claimed that empiricism was the solution. Part of me thinks that the power of psychoanalysis is that it can encourage a form of understanding that transcends casual theories of behavior. If this is true, then perhaps the psychoanalysts are right and trying to differentiate between different psychoanalytic causal theories using empiricism is a worthless endeavor. In this light, the power of a psychoanalytic theory is not in the certainty of its claims but in its flexibility.

Needless to say, my opinions on the relationship between psychoanalysis and empiricism are very tenuous, and that tenuousness is also a source of uncertainty for me about my future career path. I could, for example, be trained as a clinical psychologist at a psychoanalytically inclined university, if I decided that empirical training was a necessary part of being a good psychotherapist. Alternatively, I could go to a psychoanalytic institute (after going to grad school in philosophy or some other area), if I decided that I didn't want to be involved with empirical approaches at all.

Anyway, let me end with a bit about this blog and what I'll be writing about. As well as talking about psychoanalytic theory within its own context, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the intersections between psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology, as well as the role psychoanalysis can play in thinking about literature. So I imagine those topics will probably be discussed here also.

Just in case you are curious, my favorite psychoanalytic authors are Jonathan Lear (who got me into psychoanalysis with his book Love and Its Place in Nature), Adam Phillips (whose adept play with psychoanalytic theory has given me faith in its flexibility), and Nancy Chodorow (who made me feel better about saying, yes, there are parts of Freud that we can discard, or at least hold as far away from us as possible).

I haven't completely set out the syllabus yet, but I know that the next two weeks are going to be spent reading about transference (my favorite psychoanalytic concept!). This week I'm reading several of Freud's papers on transference and starting the case study of Dora, and next week I'll be finishing that case study and reading essays written about transference by other psychoanalysts. I'll probably spend something like 6-8 weeks on Freud, 1-2 each on Winnicott, Lacan, and Klein, and maybe I'll spend a week near the end good psychology papers if I can find enough of them (I already have one sitting around that I've been meaning to read). There's also one more book by Lear that I haven't read yet and I'd like to get around to that.