Psychoanalysis is still relevant because:
- Psychoanalytic theories and therapies strive to understand the unique phenomenology of a person. In doing so, the meaning and values that give significance to our lives are honored and supported. In our modern era of brain research, a person’s experience of living is sometimes reduced to a discussion of biochemicals and brain structures. Love, happiness, sadness, or misery can be simplistically “explained” by neuropathways, select brain regions, and neurotransmitters. While the remarkable advances of science have allowed researchers to understand how biological systems function during the experience of such emotions, they actually offer descriptions of how they happen, not explanations for these phenomena. By reducing the essence of the human experience (or any living creature’s experience, for that matter) to an objectified mechanistic system, we deny the most salient of human abilities, our imagination! Our capacity to create seemingly limitless ideas and stories has allowed the mind to be emancipated from the constraints of sensory reality. We imagine, invent, create, and transcend beyond the material world toward a world of potentialities. Certainly, psychoanalysis is still relevant today!
- All civilized societies require that persons conform to the standards, rules, and expectations that are necessary to live cooperatively. Our socialization begins at birth and requires that a person learn to adapt to social demands and to internalize those demands as one’s own. The primary task for mental health is to achieve this conformity while preserving one’s personal integrity. This integrity requires us to respect our diversity in many forms, such as ethnic, religious, sexual, etc., while balancing our needs for social connection and acceptance. Psychoanalytic therapies have kept these existential considerations central to the mission of advancing human understanding and promoting personal growth.
- As today’s technology has allowed us nearly immediate gratification for many of our needs, such convenience can undermine a person’s emotional maturity by circumventing the ability to tolerate frustration. Tolerating frustration involves the ability to delay gratification, self-containment of tension states, inhibiting reflexive action, and the ability to engage in thoughtful, reflective planning. Lacking in this capacity, one is prone toward impulsive and potentially addictive lifestyles. No wonder, then, that these addictive and impulsive styles have historically been seen as characteristic of adolescence, where mature brain development has not yet been achieved. If, however, needs and demands can be satisfied in nanoseconds, there is little motivation to cultivate self-containment. Psychoanalytic therapies are not quick fixes, intentionally, so as to allow for the facilitation of the maturing processes to unfold. So, while some might call this old-fashioned, it is actually a principle aligned with how nature works. The emergence and unfolding of the mind is better supported by engaging our internal emotional and cognitive potentials to grapple with life’s challenges, than by adopting canned answers from the internet or random facts from Google searches.
- Psychoanalytic therapies strive to enhance self-awareness. Patients are encouraged and empowered to seek their personal truths through introspection and insight. The role of the therapist serves as a guide who accompanies the patient through the exploration and examination of one’s private mind. As a guide, the therapist offers some protection from the fear of self-knowledge and, most importantly, serves as a witness to the self-truths that may need to be proclaimed. Guiding and witnessing are among the most important interpersonal functions as they offer a secure acceptance and validation of the individual. These functions establish the conditions for healthy attachment and honor a person’s value and purpose. It is important to recognize that psychoanalysis is still relevant today.
- As a system for understanding mental illness, or human suffering, psychoanalytic models provide a compassionate and normalizing perspective. Whereas symptoms are expressions of suffering, they also represent a person’s best effort at retaining whatever sanity that person has achieved. Psychoneuroses are distinguished from other forms of misery by referring to the mental suffering derived from conflicts within and between persons. The gift of our imagination can also be a curse when it comes to facing unfathomable thoughts, fantasies, and recollections. Psychoanalytic therapy allows the patient to distinguish perceptions from fantasies, desires from needs, or speculations from truths. Insight and corrective emotional experiences with the therapist can help us regain our ability to care for ourselves and our loved ones.
- Why do critics of psychoanalysis say that it is not a science and that it does not stand up to rigorous empirical validation from scientific testing? This criticism is partially true, but misleading. In psychoanalytic therapies, the focus of inquiry and treatment is exclusively upon a person’s unique subjective experience and thus each treatment is unique in itself. Therefore, every therapy is tailored to the specific needs of the individual based upon his/her personality, background, abilities, and maturity. One person’s therapy cannot be accurately compared to another’s, precluding the meaningful comparisons needed for scientifically controlled research studies. Simply put, psychoanalytic therapies treat people, not diagnoses. This approach to therapy values the person over the diagnosis. That is, the focus of treatment is to help a patient achieve an improved quality of life, not simply to reduce problematic symptoms. This goal may be achieved by reducing symptoms to some degree but may also include acceptance of one’s self and that some of life’s issues need to be survived rather than “fixed.” Furthermore, many studies have shown that the single most important factor for any successful psychotherapy, regardless of type, is the quality of the relationship between the therapist and the patient. The therapeutic relationship has been the cornerstone of psychoanalysis since its inception. Yet another example of how psychoanalysis is still relevant today!
- Nobel laureate, Eric Kandel, has stated that psychoanalytic theory offers the most comprehensive understanding of the mind among all other psychological theories. The ideas and concepts have undergone over a century of revisions and modifications aimed at helping to understand the human condition. As complex and multi-faceted creatures we are endowed with an incessant curiosity and remarkable resilience. We not only invented science, but also the humanities. Art, music, literature, and dance are methods humans have created to express the enormity of our shared lives and the drive to understand the essential meaning of our existence. Psychoanalytic theories also examine our relationship to these humanities as they may hold personal significance for the individual. Psychoanalysis evolved from Freud’s devotion to understanding himself and others as members of a dominant world species. All of our methods for expression serve to approximate, but never fully elucidate, human uniqueness.
Psychoanalysis is still relevant today; in fact, it has never been more important.
To learn about current research validating the approach with children and adolescents, see the course, Evidence Base for Psychodynamic Psychotherapy With Children and Adolescents. It will provide you with a link to a free peer-reviewed article.
More research is also cited in the blog post, Is Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Empirically Validated?
Interested in earning a Certificate of Advanced Study in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy? Simply complete 48 CE credits with our psychoanalytic courses, including at least three course courses. Entirely online, accessible 24/7, and paced at your convenience.
The Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. The Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies maintains responsibility for this program and its content.
