A Diagnosis for Psychoanalysis in the 21st Century: Freud as Medicine
by Sarah Ackerman, PhD
Abstract
This paper assesses the history of psychoanalysis in the United States in order to inform a “professional memoir” of the author’s experience of analytic training in the 21st Century. The mix of historical and personal landscapes supports a contention that there is something missing or lost in American psychoanalysis, that psychoanalysis has lost sight of the radical and subversive nature of unconscious processes. I argue that only by returning to a study of rigorous and comprehensive theory, seated in Freud’s work, can this absence be addressed.
Link to Online Publication [fulltext can also be requested from the library].
The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 89:4, 667-688, October 2020.
About the Author
Sarah Ackerman, PhD, is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, co-chair of the Psychoanalysis Study Group sponsored by the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College, and Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College. She maintains a private practice in Hanover, New Hampshire. She is the author of many articles, including recently published “I May Allow Myself to do This”: Conflict in Freud’s Writing of The Interpretation of Dreams and (How) Can We Write about Our Patients? and Impossible Ethics.
Previous Posts:
Lora Tessman, PhD (2020). Review of Ghost in the Human Psyche: The Story of a ‘Muslim Armenian’ , by Vamik D. Volkan. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 56(2-3):457-464.
Steven H. Cooper, PhD (2019). A Theory of the Setting: The Transformation of Unrepresented Experience and Play. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 100:6, 1439-1454.
Anton Hart, PhD (2020). Principles For Teaching Issues Of Diversity In A Psychoanalytic Context. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 56:2-3, 404-417.
Lawrence J. Brown, PhD (2020). Trauma and Representation. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 100:6, 1154-1170.
Penelope Moore, LICSW (2020). Incest from a Young Age … Lasting a Lifetime. Psychodynamic Psychiatry, 48(1), 41-54.
Judith L. Kantrowitz, PhD (2020). A Psychoanalytic Memoir: The Analyst Enabled and Disabled by What is Personal. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 68(1), 83–100.
Cuneyt Iscan, MD (2020). Learning Along the Way: Further Reflections on Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy by Patrick Casement, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2019, 156pp. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 80:2, 235-239.
Anna Ornstein, MD (2020). The Relativity of Morality in the Contemporary World. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 40:4, 223-233.
Sarah Ackerman, PhD (2020). Impossible Ethics. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. 2020;68(4):561-582.
Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau, PhD (2020). How Demagogy Works: Reflections on Aggression in Politically Fraught Times. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 40:4, 234-242
Judy Yanof, MD (2020). A Separation: Breaking Up Is Hard to Do. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 73:1, 172-181.
Elsa Ronningstam et al. (2020). Psychotherapeutic Treatment of Depressive Symptoms in Patients with Narcissistic Disturbances: A Review. Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, 50, 21–28.
John C. Foehl (2020). Lived Depth: A Phenomenology of Psychoanalytic Process and Identity. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 40(2), 131-146.
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