Basic Principles of Psychoanalysis

Freud devised psychoanalysis as a cure for hysterical conversion symptoms and rapidly added obsessional-compulsive neurotics to his client base. After he introduced the analysis of aggression, in addition to sexuality, his followers found extended psychoanalyses effective for the treatment of character or personality. The subsequent development of ego psychology, led by Anna Freud and Heinz Hartmann, promoted increasingly mechanistic models of defense analysis. Meantime, object relations theories, which imagined the psyche to contain mental representations of bodily parts and whole persons, were offered by Melanie Klein and W. R. D. Fairbairn. The British "Middle School" or Independents developed a technique that promoted "regression" to the early infantile period prior to the pathogenic trauma. The work of Freud's friend Sandor Ferenczi, which was formative of the British Independents, was also taken up in American by Clara Thompson, Harry Stack Sullivan, and their school of "interpersonal psychiatry", who expanded the client base to include psychotics. Reactions against the dominance of ego psychology included Heinz Kohut's self-psychology in the United States, Jacques Lacan's revisions of French psychoanalysis, the spread of Kleinian theory throughout South America, and the rise of the American school of relational psychoanalysis. The various schools of psychoanalysis have all been atheistic or, at least, methodologically agnostic, with the exception of the British Independents, who accommodated liberal Christian ethico-moral concerns. Occasional analysts of all schools have been mystics; James Grotstein and Michael Eigen have both found ways to bring their patients to mystical experiences as routine components of their analytic work. Dan Merkur