Erik Erikson and his problematic identity.

In his psychohistorical biographies of Luther and Gandhi, Erik Erikson proposed that great issues of a particular time and place, as experienced by sensitive and creative individuals who are working to resolve their inner conflicts within these contexts, could find solutions that transcend themselves and yield conceptualizations that transform the world. Although Erikson was able to create a conceptualization of the adolescent task of establishing a coherent identity, one that gave voice to the aspirations and frustrations of the rebellious student movements of the 1960s, he was never able, over his lifetime, to resolve his own identity issues. Was he Dane or German, American or Scandinavian, Jew or Christian or both? His lifelong back-and-forths on this struggle are chronicled.

Will psychoanalysis fulfill its promise?

Although Freud had aspirations of a university structure for psychoanalytic education the sociopolitical structure of the Austro-Hungarian empire precluded this, and psychoanalysis developed by default in the central European heartland within a part-time, private-practice educational structure. With its rapid spread in the post-World-War-II United States, and its ready penetration of American academic psychiatry, a counter educational structure arose in some quarters: the department-of-psychiatry-affiliated institute within the medical school. This article outlines beyond these other, more ambitious, academic vistas (the David Shakow model, the Anna Freud model, the Menninger Foundation, Emory University (USA), AP de BA (Argentina)); conceptions even closer to the ideal (idealized) goal of full-time placement within the university, with strong links to medicine, to the behavioral sciences and to the humanities.

Psychoanalysis in the university: the natural home for education and research.

Psychoanalysis as a theory of human mental functioning and a derived therapeutic for disturbed functioning would have its natural home in the university, and Freud gave evidence of harboring such an ambition. But the sociopolitical structure of the early 20th century Austro-Hungarian Empire precluded this, and analysis developed, by default, its part-time, private practice-based educational structure. Psychoanalytic penetration of academic psychiatry in the United States after World War II made possible a counter-educational structure, the department of psychiatry-affiliated psychoanalytic institute within the country's medical schools.

The Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (PDM): rationale, conception, and structure.

The declaredly atheoretical DSM-III (and its successors), the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association, was created to enhance diagnostic reliability for research, epidemiological survey, and governmental and insurance categorization and reimbursement purposes. It has, however, exhibited many inadequacies for psychodynamic diagnosis and case formulation for treatment planning and outcome assessment, and its claimed diagnostic reliability has turned out to be less than originally projected. The psychoanalytically sponsored Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (PDM) marks a return to a theoretically (psychoanalytically) based diagnostic frame and was created as a supplement to, or replacement for, DSM (depending on the precise clinical need), for use in psychodynamic diagnosis and treatment planning.

Psychoanalysis in the university: a full-time vision.

Psychoanalysis may be unique among scholarly disciplines and professions in having grown as an educational enterprise in a private part-time setting, outside the university. Freud would have liked it to be otherwise, but in Central Europe, when it was created, university placement was not possible. In America, after World War II, the concept of the medical school department of psychiatry psychoanalytic institute was established in some psychoanalytic training centers but it could only partly overcome the educational and research inadequacies of traditional psychoanalytic training.

Review of Polarities of experience: Relatedness and self-definition in personality development, psychopathology, and the therapeutic process and Relatedness, self-definition and mental representation: Essays in honor of Sidney J. Blatt.

Reviews the books, Polarities of experience: Relatedness and self-definition in personality development, psychopathology, and the therapeutic process by Sidney J. Blatt (see record 2008-01813-000) and Relatedness, self-definition and mental representation: Essays in honor of Sidney J. Blatt edited by John S.

What kind of research in psychoanalytic science?

The kind of science that psychoanalysis is (can be), and the kind of research appropriate to it, qualitative and/or quantitative, have been divisive issues from the very inception of the discipline. I explore in detail the complexity of these issues, definitional and semantic, as well as methodological and substantive. A plea is made for the application of qualitative (idiographic)and quantitative (nomothetic) research methods, each to the extent that is appropriate, separately or in conjunction, across the entire spectrum of research domains in psychoanalysis, empirical, clinical, conceptual, historical, and interdisciplinary.

The optimal structure for psychoanalytic education today: a feasible proposal?

Our psychoanalytic training system, close to a century old, has been subjected to increasing criticism, starting shortly after its creation, for failing to properly fulfill its avowed purposes. The most intense critiques have centered around the authoritarian power lodged in a self-selected training analyst elite, the inadequate development of a psychoanalytic research tradition, and the isolation of our educational structure from cognate disciplines concerned with human mental life, owing to its private and part-time nature, apart from the university with its spectrum of biological and human sciences. Efforts to reform this system, including the establishment of psychoanalytic institutes within medical school departments of psychiatry, and the further call for their autonomous placement within the university at large, with full-time students and faculty, have been only partially successful and have not become widespread.

The trajectory of psychoanalysis: a prognostication.

I present an overview of the development to this point of psychoanalysis as a discipline--both as a theory of the mind and a treatment of the disorders of the mind--and offer a prediction concerning evolving development over its (near) future. My focus is on the coherence of psychoanalysis as a theoretical structure, starting with Freud's strenuous endeavours to maintain the psychoanalysis that he had single-handedly created as a unitary and unified theory, tracing then the breakdown of this effort, even in Freud's lifetime, into the burgeoning theoretical diversity or pluralism that characterises worldwide psychoanalysis today, and then going on to the beginning appearance of evidences--not yet widely remarked--of growing convergences from within very disparate and even seemingly very opposed theoretical perspectives, at least at the level of technical interventions and experience-near clinical theory, with implications, however, even for the level of experience-distant general (metapsychological) theory. Such a development, if sustained, as I anticipate, would strengthen the credibility of psychoanalysis as a science of the mind, amenable to growth through empirical research in accord with the canons of scientific method.

The growth and transformation of American ego psychology.

The roots of ego psychology trace back to Sigmund Freud's The Ego and the Id (1923) and "Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety" (1926), works followed by two additional fundaments, Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936) and Heinz Hartmann's Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (1939). It was brought to full flowering in post-World War II America by Hartmann and his many collaborators, and for over two decades it maintained a monolithic hegemony over American psychoanalysis. Within this framework the conceptions of the psychoanalytic psychotherapies evolved as specific modifications of psychoanalytic technique directed to the clinical needs of the spectrum of patients not amenable to psychoanalysis proper.