Psychoanalysis
Impact On Other Disciplines
The influence of psychoanalytic theory upon contemporary thought is difficult to overstate, and equally difficult to quantify. Fundamental concepts of a dynamic unconscious, repression, ego, infantile sexuality, and the Oedipus complex have passed into popular discourse. Psychoanalysis is the root of all contemporary forms of psychotherapy, and as a clinical modality has had an enormous impact on the treatment of mental illness and on the fields of psychology and psychiatry, though this influence has been challenged in recent years by the rise of biological psychiatry. Though the scientific validity of its methods and premises has been hotly disputed, neuro-scientists, including Mark Solms, Antonio Damasio, Jaak Panksepp, and Joseph LeDoux, were actively conducting research in the early twenty-first century to correlate psychoanalytic ideas with the latest findings in brain science.
In the humanities, psychoanalytic theory has strongly influenced approaches to literary texts, biography, history, creativity, and sociology. Freud himself was the first to apply psychoanalytic principles to the arts, through readings of Wilhelm Jensen's novel Gradiva (1903), Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann's "The Sand-Man" (1817), and several of William Shakespeare's works; and through psychobiographical essays on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leonardo da Vinci. Freud also explored the implications of his ideas upon anthropology, history, and, perhaps most famously, religion, which Freud considered a primitive, quasi-psychotic projection, and which he considered at length in The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Moses and Monotheism (1939). The poet Wallace Stevens characterized Freud's influence as "a whole climate of opinion," and the writings of Freud and other analysts, especially those of Jacques Lacan, have inspired countless artists and thinkers, including André Breton, André Gide, Benjamin, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali, Jackson Pollock, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Slavoj Zizek; and cultural movements such as surrealism, dada, existentialism, deconstruction, and postmodernism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anzieu, Didier. Freud's Self-Analysis. Translated by Peter Graham. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1986.
Deutsch, Helene. The Psychology of Women: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation. 2 vols. New York: Grune and Stratton, 1944–1945.
Freud, Sigmund. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. Edited and translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974.
Gay, Peter. Freud: A Life for Our Time. New York: Norton, 1988.
Grünbaum, Adolf. The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984.
Hale, Nathan G., Jr. The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876–1917. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
——. The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 1917–1985. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Horney, Karen. Feminine Psychology. New York: Norton, 1967.
Jones, Ernest. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. 3 vols. New York: Basic, 1953–1957.
Kernberg, Otto F. Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. New York: Aronson, 1975.
Klein, Melanie. The Writings of Melanie Klein. 4 vols. New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1975.
Kohut, Heinz. The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders. New York: International Universities Press, 1971.
Kutter, Peter, ed. Psychoanalysis International: A Guide to Psychoanalysis throughout the World. 2 vols. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, Germany: Fromann-Holzboog, 1995.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.
——. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1978.
Laplanche, Jean. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
Laplanche, Jean, and J.-B. Pontalis. The Language of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton, 1973.
Lear, Jonathan. Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.
Loewald, Hans W. Papers on Psychoanalysis. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980.
Mahler, Margaret S., Fred Pine, and Anni Bergman. The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation. New York: Basic, 1975.
Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff, trans. and ed. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1985.
McWilliams, Nancy. Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process. New York: Guilford Press, 1994.
Pine, Fred. Drive, Ego, Object, and Self: A Synthesis for Clinical Work. New York: Basic, 1990.
Tyson, Phyllis, and Robert L. Tyson. Psychoanalytic Theories of Development. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990.
Winnicott, D. W. Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic, 1958.
Matthew F. von Unwerth
Additional topics
- Psychoanalysis - Bibliography
- Psychoanalysis - Psychoanalysis And Its Vicissitudes
- Other Free Encyclopedias
Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Propagation to Quantum electrodynamics (QED)Psychoanalysis - Overview, Psychoanalytic Theory Of Mind, Infantile Sexuality And The Oedipus Complex, Later Revisions: Mourning, Narcissism, And The Beginnings Of Object Relations