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The Psychodynamic Tradition
Introduction p.2
General Overview of the Psychodynamic Tradition p.3
Psychoanalytically Derived Basic Principles and Practices p.3
The Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual p.8
Holism, Well Being and Personalized Care in the
Psychodynamic Tradition p.9
Nature, Culture and the Psychodynamic Tradition p.12
The Broad Field of the Psychodynamic Tradition p.15
Overview p.15
Psychodynamic Mental Health p.17
The Evolution of Psychoanalysis p.18
Psychoanalytically Derived Psychotherapies p.19
The Existential, Humanistic, Phenomenological and
Transpersonal Traditions p.21
Cultural Implications p.26
Specific Traditions p.28
General Cultural Field p.33
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The Psychodynamic Tradition
Introduction
In this paper I will give a general outline of the psychodynamic tradition,
showing how it is historically based in psychoanalysis, including in its theoretical
model of psychic structure and dynamics, and in clinical practice. I will also show
how it has, throughout the 20th ©, been elaborated and diversified, both
theoretically and clinically, and that it is part of a number of different traditions,
some of which are a direct extension of psychoanalysis and some of which arose
in distinction from psychoanalysis. These are in the general fields of the
humanistic/existential/phenomenological, experiential (which really arose within
the context of the humanistic/existential/phenomenological field and should be
considered part of this, although specific traditions do also have their own unique
distinctive origins and formulations within this general field, e.g. gestalt), body
oriented (e.g. bioenergetics) and expressive arts (e.g. psychodrama) traditions.
While there are significant departures, most typically in the clinical methods
employed to activate and work through psychodynamic material, all show a
fundamentally psychodynamic model of the psyche and of the human functioning
that relates to it, including psychosomatic, psychosocial and psychospiritual
themes. I will also show that the psychodynamic tradition has arisen within a
field of parallel cultural activation and that it has, in turn, had extensive impact on
western culture in general. This includes such academic areas as religious
studies, anthropology, child studies, political thought and cultural studies as well
as art and literary criticism. It has also impacted on popular culture through
literature (e.g. the existential absurd tradition and post modernism), art (e.g.
surrealism and abstract expressionism), theatre (e.g. experiential theatre and
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happenings) and movies (e.g. film noire). It has in fact become so complexly
ingrained into the popular western mindset that most people don’t even
recognize they are perceiving, thinking and framing things psychodynamically, or
that such banal things as, for example, TV commercials often have a
psychodynamic basis.
General Overview of the Psychodynamic Tradition
Psychoanalytically Derived Basic Principles and Practices
Psychodynamic psychotherapy is one of the three major streams of
psychotherapy that came into use in the 20th ©, the other two being the cognitive
behavioural and humanistic existential. While these are distinct traditions, it can
be shown that there is a psychodynamic theme in these also. CBT, however,
explicitly distinguishes itself from the psychoanalytic stream, arising in
contradistinction from it. It does not use the term psychodynamic. The
humanistic/existential tradition in general is much more intertwined with the
psychoanalytic origins of the psychodynamic tradition, and even in those
humanistic/existential modalities not developed as elaborations of
psychoanalysis (e.g. gestalt), an extensive, complex psychodynamic model is
nevertheless present.
The psychodynamic tradition is a defining feature of twentieth century
western culture. It originated as psychoanalysis with Freud’s work on
understanding and treating psychological and psychosomatic disturbances, what
he came to call neurosis, in fin de siècle Vienna, particularly as it manifested in
female patients. The theoretical and clinical model that developed drew on his
attempt to reframe elements of German Romanticism in a scientific mode, based
on his neuropsychiatric background, and combining Breur’s ‘talking cure’ model
of treating hysteria with Charcot’s clinical experience in hypnosis. The original
essence of this model is the idea that the human being mentally experiences life,
and functions in life, based on the interaction of competing conscious goal
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directed and unconscious instinctual tendencies, called the topographic model.
More recently this model suggests that mental phenomena (such as thoughts
and images), body phenomena (such as sensation) and intermediate
phenomena (such as feeling and emotion) are created by the conflictual interplay
of conscious and unconscious factors with environmental and interpersonal
stimuli on a basis of physiology.
The early psychoanalytic hypnotic and free association experiments with
patients in a reclining state of reverie led to the development of a model of
human nature that included an awareness of this conflictual theme in an
individual’s life experience and a focus on an unconscious hidden depth in their
interiority. This hidden depth, while not present to everyday consciousness, had
a significant influence in the form of unwanted thoughts, emotions, images etc.,
uncontrollable behaviour and unintended consequences, as well as symptoms
such as depression, anxiety and somatizations. Patient’s dreams were seen to
particularly reveal unconscious material symbolocically, making it available for
working through by dream analysis, to be interpreted in the context of the
person’s everyday life. Freud’s work had started in the 1880’s, but it was his
Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, that attracted Stekel, Adler, Rank,
Jung and others, leading, in 1907, to the formation of the Vienna Psychoanalytic
Society. Significantly, it included accounts of Freud’s attempts to interpret his
own dreams, thus establishing a theme that is a cornerstone of the
psychodynamic tradition – the involvement of the psychotherapists own person in
the process, and the necessity, therefore, of undergoing one’s own
psychotherapy as part of being a competent psychotherapist.
The key defining feature of the psychodynamic model is this observation
that there is a hidden variable (the ‘unconscious’) which affects our everyday
conscious thoughts, feelings, emotions, imagination, intentions, motivations and
behaviour and is in conflict with our everyday conscious sense of self. In the
psychoanalytic model, this dynamic structuring of the psyche is said to originate
in several ways: (1) in how we have structurally encoded the past i.e. in how we
grew up, including, in particular, the remnants of traumatic events and
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developmental deficits, particularly how we have interpreted them – the
epigenetic model (this is the first developmental theory of personality, based on
personal historical progress through psychosexual stages); (2) in how we
manage the inner conflicts between what came to be called the (instinctual,
sexual, aggressive) id, the (moralistic, rational) superego, through the mediation
of the (differentiating, pragmatic, relational) ego – the tripartite or structural
model; (3) in how we manage our relationships with significant others, including
how these are internalized as psychological ‘objects’ - the object relations model.
All this is then said to affect the phenomenology of how we consciously take up
our existential situation in the present. Although these models are variously
applied with different emphasis within the diverse psychoanalytic traditions, and
with even more diversity in psychoanalytically derived traditions (such as
Jungian, bioenergetic), there is, nevertheless, widespread common use.
The model for the management of competing, conflictual drives, demands
or tendencies is dialectic i.e. the evocation of the conflict, the holding of the
dualistic tension rather than striving to collapse the tension into a single dominant
polarity, dialogue or negotiation between the warring opposites, and the eventual
compromise that gives rise to an integrating dialectic third which highlights the
comlementary, rather than just conflictual, nature of the opposites. This requires
the acceptance of paradox and ambivalence as basic to mature adult functioning.
This draws on the Romantic tradition, particularly Hegel, and is a part of the
psychodynamic tradition that is shared by many of the diverse examples. It has
also become a prominent part of various cultural criticism traditions, such as
Critical Theory and postmodernism.
The traumatic remnants, developmental deficits, dynamic conflicts and
relational issues that are carried into adult identity are encoded in the
unconscious and are managed through modulating barriers between the
everyday consciousness and the unconscious. Various psychodynamic traditions
identify these modulating barriers with terms such as defenses, resistance, ego
structure and all suggest that functionality and dysfunctionality are significantly
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related to the age and situation specific apropriatness of this modulation. In some
psychodynamic traditions, the dynamic structure of the psyche is also said to be
a way for spiritual or archetypal influences to enter everyday conscious life. It is
thus said to have both a personal historical component and a transpersonal
(spiritual or archetypal) ahistoric component. The unconscious is variously
experienced as a deep, interior, subtle, hidden but powerful organizer of
everyday consciousness and behaviour. It is sometimes felt to be mysterious,
threatening, dangerous and forbiding. It is thus laden with cultural taboos and
controlled by moralistic personal preferences or values.
There is a typicality to how any individual manages the everyday
conscious/unconscious relationship that is more or less consistent over time.
Though for an individual this typicality may change somewhat through life
circumstances or modalities such as psychotherapy, there are considered to be a
limited number of personality or character types and an individual’s typicality
tends to be globally consistent over the life span. What changes through
psychotherapy is the dysfunctionality of the personality, with symptomatic
amelioration and a lessening of the ways in which the individual’s life possibilities
are limited. The various personality or character types have been defined based
on stages of developmental arrest (e.g. oral, anal) and typicality of
psychodynamic style (e.g. histrionic, schizoid) or relational style (e.g. borderline,
narcissistic). Body oriented psychotherapies, such as bioenergetics, also include
somatic characteristics in this typicality. Some transpersonal psychodynamic
therapies employ a psychospiritual typology based on, for example, mythological
correlations, such as in Jungian and archetypal psychotherapies.
The psyche, then, is a dynamically structured, energetic, economic and
relational phenomena that gives rise to typical thoughts, feelings, images,
behaviour – a personality or character type - and under certain conditions of
trauma, stress or developmental problems can give rise to signs of
dysfunctionality. Changes to this dysfuncionality, both symptomatic and
characterological, are said to come through insight into how unconscious factors
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play into the everyday conscious self. Insight is mediated through the actuality of
the therapeutic relationship as expressive of these unconscious factors, which,
with proper attention to things such as characterological tendencies and timing in
the process, can be brought to consciousness. Sometimes this is done through
direct feedback offered by the psychotherapist, such as ‘intepretation’ in
psychoanalysis, or through experiential exercises, as in the humanistic traditions.
In gestalt this is called an ‘aha’ experience.
This constellation of a patient’s unconscious factors in a therapeutic
relationship is called transference. The evocation and working through of the
transference is an essence of psychodynamic psychotherapy. This is a
therapeutically modulated enactment that provides the possibility to correct early
life negative experiences i.e. for old, distorted, self limiting conclusions that the
patient has come to regarding themselves, relationships, life in general to be
reviewed and a new, more healthy, realistic point of view established. This
requires the psychotherapist to strive to be consciously aware of his or her own
unconscious projections into the therapeutic relationship, called
countertransference. This means that they themselves need to undergo the
same program of treatment and to have reached a minimal level of personal
maturation before beginning unsupervised practice. It also means seeking
ongoing supervision from peers where necessary.
Another very important characteristic of the psychodynamic tradition that
began with Freud and the early psychoanalysts is the case study. Freud
developed his theories based on conversations with individuals which he wrote
down, interpreted and published as the early basis of psychoanalysis. Although
this has been the foundation of some criticism of the tradition as being not
qualitatively scientific, it can also be considered part of what makes the tradition
unique and important – attention to particular, individual details of a person’s life,
interpreted in the context of that person’s life story and having unique, individual
meaning for that person. This qualitative method relates psychoanalysis to
Husserl’s phenomenological method, and to the general field of the humanisticexistential-phenomenological tradition.
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The Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual
These psychodynamic principles and practices are encoded in the
recently published Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (PDM) which was
developed to complement the more empirical and behaviourally based DSM
(Diagnostic and Statistics Manual), which lacks a psychodynamic
perspective.The PDM, published in 2006 by the Alliance of Psychoanalytic
Organizations, came into existence out of a concern that the clinically rich and
theoretically diverse, approximately 100 year history of the psychodynamic
tradition not be lost to the psychotherapy and mental health fields by the adoption
of a non psychodynamic, empirically based, research oriented DSM III and IV,
over the last 30 years.
It is not well known that during the formulation of the DSM all
psychodynamic input was deliberately excluded from the process. The empirical
orientation of DSM paralleled a drive toward making the psychotherapy field
more scientific through empirically supported therapies (EST’s) based in the
research “gold standard” of randomized clinical trials (RCT’s). This meant that
therapies that could be focused on clearly definable and measurable symptom
groupings became financially supported by the emerging managed care system
in the U.S. There was also a concerted push to have this perspective taught in
psychological and medical schools rather than the more complex and long term
psychodynamic perspective.
According to the PDM website (www.pdm1.org) “the PDM is based on
current neuroscience and treatment outcome studies … that demonstrate the
importance of focusing on the full range and depth of emotional and social
functioning. For example, research on the mind and brain and their development
shows that the patterns of emotional, social, and behavioural functioning involve
many interconnected areas working together, rather than in isolation. Treatment
outcome studies point to the importance of dealing with the full complexity of
emotional and social patterns and show that the therapeutic relationship is the
major predictor of outcomes. They further show that treatments that focus on
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isolated symptoms or behaviours are not effective in sustaining gains or
addressing complex personality patterns.”
“The PDM was developed on the premise that a clinically useful
classification of mental health disorders must begin with an understanding of
healthy mental functioning. Mental health involves more than simply the absence
of symptoms. It involves a person's overall mental functioning, including
relationships, emotional regulation, coping capacities, and self-observing
abilities.”
“In the last two decades, there has been an increasing tendency to define
mental problems more and more on the basis of presenting symptoms and their
patterns, with overall personality functioning and levels of adaptation playing a
minor role. The whole person has been less visible than the various disorder
constructs on which researchers attempt to find agreement. Recent reviews of
this effort raise the possibility that such a strategy was misguided. Ironically,
emerging evidence suggests that oversimplifying mental health phenomena in
the service of attaining consistency of description (reliability) and capacity to
evaluate treatment empirically (validity) may have compromised the laudable
goal of a more scientifically sound understanding of mental health and
psychopathology. Most problematically, reliability and validity data for many
disorders are not as strong as the mental health community had hoped they
would be.”
Holism, Well Being and Personal Care in the Psychodynamic
Tradition
One of the chief foci of any psychodynamic therapy is not just the
important goal of the alleviation of suffering and symptomatology, but also the
question “what kind of person are you?” not from a critical, moralistic, conformist
perspective, but from a humanistic, individualistic, psychological, liberationist
perspective. This theme is variously termed holism, humanism, human
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potential, individuation(Jung), mature adult functioning, self
actualization(Maslow), fully functioning person(Rogers). This is again a unique
feature of the psychodynamic tradition – caring for the whole person, not just
treating symptoms. This is usually one of the main reasons the patient will
choose a psychodynamic modality – the empathic, careful, skilled attention given
to the development of the whole person. This feature of the psychodynamic
tradition may be also spoken of as a concern with what it is to be an individual
and what it is to be human, which goes beyond psychology into philosophy,
anthropology and culture.
The psychodynamic tradition moves the focus of concern from “how
should I be?” a basic religious and moralistic question, to the existential
questions “how am I, how do I find myself?”. Based in these existential questions,
with various ‘good enough’ caring methodologies and trusting in the self-arising,
emergent, evolutionary tendency of the psyche, the therapy moves the patient
toward healthy mature functioning and the fully lived life of involvement in the
culture and the natural world that goes with this. This goes beyond traumatic
recovery and deficit reduction. It provides the possibility for an outcome that is
not specifically predetermined in a limited focused manner, but, rather, one that
is emergently expressive of the particular unique, individuality of the patient.
Definable, quantifiable, measurable outcomes that are predetermined in, for
example, goal oriented therapies, become qualitatively realized, emergent
outcomes in which the whole person is included in the focus of concern in a
psychodynamic model. In this sense, the psychodynamic tradition includes the
promotion of well being as part of the therapeutic process.
One of the paradigmatic defining features of the psychodynamic tradition
is the special nature of the therapeutic relationship, with what it calls for from the
therapist and provides to the patient. The psychodynamic tradition is not just a
vehicle for delivering professional skilled help through a methodology that the
therapist has extensive training in over several years. It is also itself the subject
of therapy i.e. the psychodynamic therapeutic relationship becomes a place for
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enactment of the patient’s internal psychodynamic issues through what is called
transference – the projection of these issues onto the therapist and onto the
therapeutic relationship. There is thus an irreducible personal element to any
psychodynamic therapy, requiring that the therapist not only undergo extensive
theoretical and clinical training, but also that they themselves undergo their own
therapy in the service of becoming, more or less, free of their own neurotic or
personality disordered psychodynamics. Through this modality, called a training
analysis in psychoanalysis and Jungian psychotherapy, and through supervision,
the therapist’s tendency to counter transference (projecting his or her own
psychodynamic issues onto the patient) is dealt with, and they are better able to
absorb and manage the transference projections without either deflecting them or
over reacting to them.
The personhood of the therapist is thus uniquely involved in any
psychodynamic therapy, the precise form of this and extent of this varying across
a spectrum. The humanistic/existential tradition calls for a more forward, involved
engagement by the therapist, while the psychoanalytic tradition is more
dispassionately inclined. This requirement for the therapist to undergo their own
therapy together with the, more or less, active involvement of their own person in
the process of the therapy itself makes the psychodynamic tradition unique. In
this it is significantly distinguished from CBT and outcome oriented therapies
which are skill based methodologies requiring no significant personal
involvement from the therapist and no requirement of the therapist to have
undergone the therapy themselves. This human involvement not only requires
skills training but also the ongoing questioning of what kind of person you are as
a therapist. Supervisory questions then involve not only “what skills are you
employing here?” but also “how are you reacting, how is your personality
involved?” and then addressing any issues so identified. There is thus a
potential for a special empathic kind of delivery of psychotherapeutic care in this
psychodynamically defined situation. This is typically another of the main reasons
that a patient will choose this kind of therapy.
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Nature, Culture and the Psychodynamic Tradition
The focus on the natural state of the human individual is also extended in
some psychodynamic traditions to include how we relate to the natural world.
The humanistic, transpersonal and Jungian/archetypal traditions specifically
include a focus on this theme in what it means to be healthy and wholesome
(i.e.”what is the state of your relationship with the natural world?”) and making
therapeutic suggestions that include dealing with this relationship through
involvement with nature, and in being actively involved in caring for the
environment. Institutions and organizations in these traditions typically mount
workshops and provide teaching in this area. The field of ecopsychology has
arisen out of a ground of ecospirituality, feminism and archetypal psychology.
In a similar manner, the purview of the psychodynamic tradition has also
extended beyond ‘psychotherapy’ to what we may call ‘culture therapy’. This has
been the case throughout the 20th ©. In various forms in the different
psychodynamic traditions there has been a desire to go beyond just the
individual’s problems to attend to the context in within these problems arise. This
means not only family of origin issues but also the cultural system within which
the family lives. Cultural attitudes to emotion, body, sexuality, touch, weakness,
failure, success, discipline, ambition, for example, all impact on an individual’s
psychological health. While this is directly mediated through specific family
dynamics, the culture itself sets the background tone of parameters, limits,
mores, codes and ethos. This is communicated, in a more or less imposing
style, through, for example, the education system, but also through popular
culture in general. This was a particular concern of the existential
psychotherapist R.D. Laing who has written extensively on it and, through the
Philadelphia Association, created healing communities where the impact of the
distortions of the culture at large could be mitigated. The theme of community is
clearly and specifically addressed in the transpersonal and humanistic traditions,
both in their training institutions and professional organizations. The
psychoanalytic tradition has contributed significantly to the humanizing and
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softening of attitudes towards children, instigating a move from seeing them as
little ignorant adults who need to be disciplined and instructed in a dominant
style, to seeing them as adequate, sentient, motivated, evolutionary beings who
are capable of learning through reciprocal, mutual relationship.
This theme then becomes that of having direct impact on the conditions in
which individual neurosis and personality disordered symptomatolgy arises i.e.
the socio political and cultural contexts. As well as the psychoanalytic direct
input into disciplines such as anthropology, child rearing practices, literary
criticism through academic studies, clinical applications and social programs,
there is also the social critic and cultural activist themes arising from, for
example, psychodynamic input into the Frankfurt School/Critical Theory/post
modernism stream. This has been particularly impactful in 20th © western
culture. In addition, in the humanistic existential and transpersonal fields, part of
the mandate of training institutions and professional organizations is to be
actively involved in the cultural and political fields, based in the idea that these
are the conditions in which psychological disorders arise, but also that they are
legitimate and vital areas of human concern in themselves. This is a long term
prophylactic, epidemiological view that extends beyond care to individuals in
therapy and to the culture as a whole. The Association for Humanistic
Psychology’s active drive to bring a psychodynamic, humanistic perspective to
Russian cultural evolution since the collapse of the Soviet Union is one example,
as is the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture’s public programs, with their
Jungian/archetypal focus on quality of life in the city. The Alonso Centre for
Psychodynamic Studies in the USA specifically aims some of its programs at the
general public as a way of contributing to, for example, family well being, and
also brings together psychologists, psychiatrists, educators and organizational
development experts as part of its focus on “human life”,
(www.fielding.edu/about/alonso).
This psychodynamic theme of mutual, egalitarian reciprocity has
undergone a parallel emergence in the corporate world, where business
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negotiations in a progressive, pragmatic environment include not just a
competitive striving for dominance but the recognition that the inclusion of
mutuality and co-operation, as well as acknowledgement of unconscious
psychodynamic factors, brings more effectiveness and productivity. In the
general area of conflict resolution this psychodynamic theme also shows itself.
Not just striving to defeat ‘the enemy’ in a militaristic drive for victory over the
other, but recognition of mutual self interest and egalitarian co-operation as being
fundamentally more realistic and pragmatic, so that more resources can be
directly allocated to problem solving rather than the more immediate and limited
goal of achieving dominance and only then being able to ‘fix’ things because you
are now in charge. One key point in this is that the long term consequence of a
built in reaction against being defeated and dominated is avoided, thus
minimizing the subsequent possibility of revolutionary overthrow of the imposed
solution. These psychodynamically related, egalitarian, co-operative mutuality
themes are expressed in the philosophical and political basis of the European
Union. The systems psychodynamics perspective combines traditional
psychoanalysis, Kleinian object relations and Bion’s group model with systems
theory to provide a method for addressing organizational problems. The
psychodynamic model also highlights the need for addressing contradictory
tensions between positivistic social and organizational intentions and the more
obstructionist, defensive, emotional unconscious factors that come into play
when people try to cooperate.
In the early 90’s a controversial aspect of the use of the psychodynamic
model erupted around the social impact of the recovered memory movement. In
this, patients were coaxed in a process of recalling abusive events (usually
sexual) from their childhood that they had no conscious memory of, the
psychodynamic idea of repression being used to validate the veracity of these
accounts in subsequent criminal trials of ‘perpetrators’ that devastated families.
Frederich Crews in Memory Wars, Freud’s Legacy in Dispute, (1995) was the
most cogent and incisive in the rebuttal of the validity of this formulaic, legalistic
literalization of the psychodynamic model, but his critique was part of a more
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general questioning of the validity of the model itself that was emerging in the
90’s.
The Broad Field of the Psychodynamic Tradition
Overview
While the psychodynamic model originated with Freud and the early 20 th ©
psychoanalysts, it has become part of all other 20th © psychotherapies in more or
less explicit forms, and has been widely integrated into academia in various
ways. The Alonso Centre, associated with the Fielding Institute in the USA,
provides professional and public education specifically in the ‘psychodynamic’
tradition. Oxford University grants a Master of Studies degree in Psychodynamic
Practice. In many academic fields the psychodynamic model has been fruitfully
incorporated, including the Frankfurt School’s development of Culture Studies
through Critical Theory, in anthropology, religious studies, child studies, feminism
and gender studies, postmodernism.
In the 1970’s the psychoanalytic tradition began to fade as a cultural
cutting edge in some significant ways. While being encoded into the emerging
post modernist critiques of gender, power systems, hierarchy, epistemology, etc.,
it had come to be seen as limiting rather than liberating in some parts of the
psychology field - a staid, maintaining the status quo, mainstream
psychotherapy, repressive, hierarchical and stilted. This was part of the
emergence of the “Third Force” in psychotherapy – the humanistic, existential,
phenomenological and transpersonal traditions. There was an explicit, wide
ranging extension of theory and methodology, a specific inclusion of the body,
spirituality and social concerns and a distancing from the psychic determinism of
psychoanalysis, as these traditions became much more experientially and
expressively focused.
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They drew on such diverse sources as gestalt perception theory (Gestalt),
National Training Laboratory work/study groups (encounter), systems theory
(transpersonal and humanistic/existential), game theory and general semantics
(Gestalt), the holistic paradigm (transpersonal), theatre (Gestalt), Rogerian
humanism and Heideggerian existentialism (focusing), the social and sexual
liberation themes in the human potential movement (all), the integral tradition
(California Institute for Integral Studies, transpersonal), Continental Philosophy
and western mysticism (archetypal psychology), Zen Buddhism (Gestalt), Tantra
(Core Energetics), Chinese medicine (Hakomi), Tibetan Buddhism (Naropa
University, transpersonal), Eastern and Western spiritual and mystical traditions
(transpersonal), secular humanism and egalitarian politics (humanistic), the
return to nature and natural systems (all).
Training institutions were founded, some of which went on to become
accredited graduate schools (Pacifica Graduate Institute, Institute of
Transpersonal Psychology, California Institute for Integral Studies, Naropa,
Saybrook). Universities developed programs in these fields (West Georgia,
Duquesne, Seattle). Professional organizations with their peer reviewed journals
were developed (Association for Transpersonal Psychology, Association for
Humanistic Psychology, International Transpersonal Association). A specific
concern for the culture was included in theses traditions, as was a concern for
the natural world – all part of the general post ‘60’s emphasis on the whole
human being, in their own nature in the context of their culture and the natural
world.
Even cognitive behavioral therapy, through its therapeutic focus on the
relationship between behavior, cognition, affect and hidden dynamically
structuring ‘deep schemas’ (that are hidden from everyday consciousness, hard
to access and to effect change in), has a psychodynamic aspect, though
practitioners do not refer to it as such and specifically disavow any connection.
One of the typical characteristics of these elaborations is that there is
often a multimodal component. For example, while existential psychotherapy can
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be clearly identified as based in the psychodynamic model and existential
philosophy, it also variously draws on humanistic principles, as well as
phenomenological, body oriented and, sometimes, transpersonal methodologies.
It has a distinct holistic and systemic character. Similarly, Jungian psychology, as
well as its very explicit psychodynamic basis, includes extensive mythological
accounts of the psyche, drawing on Kantian and Romantic philosophy in its
cosmological and phenomenological aspects, and spiritually draws on the
Gnostic and Hermetic traditions. In its archetypal form, beginning in the 1970’s, it
also includes Plotinus’ Neoplatonism, Corbin’s Sufism and the postmodern,
phenomenological theme in Continental Philosophy.
In general, these new traditions have developed their own psychodynamic
terminology, theoretical formulations, methodologies and body of clinical
knowledge, professional organizations and peer reviewed journals, with training
programs instituted to bring practitioners up to a shared skill level. Like the
psychoanalytic tradition they have evolved through free standing training centres.
They have, however, also become part of some accredited graduate schools,
which grant MA’s and PhD’s in the field of, for example, Jungian depth
psychology (Pacifica Graduate Institute), transpersonal and somatic psychology
(California Institute for Integral Studies), phenomenological studies (Duquesne
University), the existential/humanistic tradition (Saybrook).
Psychodynamic Mental Health
The term psychodynamic (sometimes abbreviated to dynamic) began to
be particularly used in the last three decades in the field of psychiatry and mental
health(e.g. Psychodynamic Psychiatry, Glen Gabbard, 1990) in the attempt to
extend the psychodynamic model beyond the discipline of traditional
psychoanalysis, which had undergone significant criticism for various reasons.
These included its difficult methodology, its ‘unscientific’ basis and certain
cultural attitudes (e.g. toward women and homosexuality), as well as the fall out
from the ‘memory wars’ controversy that erupted around the recovered memory
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movement, while Freud himself was criticized for distorting the clinical data that
he had based his theoretical formulations on and his almost fanatical drive for
conformity in the developing field, amongst other things. The general drive
toward empirically verifiable, short term, manualizable psychotherapies that
managed care was willing to pay for was also underway, leading to the
ascendancy of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and various outcome
oriented therapies, and, in the psychoanalytic field, to the development of Short
Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (STDP). In Dynamic Psychotherapy (Hollender
and Ford, 1990), oriented toward the psychiatric mental health field, the ‘pivotal
feature’ is given as ‘the use of an understanding of the unconscious’ and the term
‘insight oriented psychotherapy’ is used interchangeably throughout the book. It
stays close to, but does not retain, the specific, typical psychoanalytic spectrum.
The Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual is in this psychiatric/psychologist/mental
health mainstream, drawing significantly on psychoanalytic formulations and not
attempting to include, for example, the existential tradition or Gestalt.
The Evolution of Psychoanalysis
The psychoanalytic tradition itself over the century had, nevertheless,
diversified and broadened from Freud’s original formulations to include differing
theoretical formulations and methodologies, some specifically dissenting from
Freud while yet formally remaining in the psychoanalytic tradition itself. These
include the work of Sullivan, Klein, Lacan, Erikson, Bion (re groups) and others,
the Tavistock tradition, ego psychology, object relations, self psychology,
psychohistory (De Mausse et al), relational and interpersonal psychotherapy,
systems psychodynamics (re organizational functioning). The fluidity and
interconnectedness of the psychoanalytic field and its psychodynamic derivatives
is highlighted in a passage from Freud and Beyond (Stephen A. Mitchell and
Margaret J. Black, 1995). “There were several important theoreticians who Freud
broke with (or who broke with Freud) early on, including Alfred Adler, Carl Jung,
Otto Rank, and Sandor Ferenczi. Many of their concepts and sensibilities,
although developed outside the Freudian mainstream, found their way back into
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psychoanalytic thinking decades later, generally without credit to the pioneer
dissidents. For example, Adler’s claim for the primacy of aggression and power
was picked up by Freud himself in his introduction of the aggressive drive, and
Adler’s emphasis on social and political factors anticipated important
developments by “culturalists” such as Harry Stack Sullivan, Erich Fromm, and
Karen Horney. Jung’s early concern with the self has been continued in the fields
of self psychology … and object relations … over the past several decades.
Jung’s other major concern, spirituality, was reviled for decades within Freudian
theory because of Freud’s repugnance toward religion … But it has returned in
the form of contemporary psychoanalytic theorizing that integrates
psychodynamics and spirituality … Rank’s groundbreaking work on the will
strongly anticipated more current explorations of agency … And Ferenczi’s
radical thought and clinical experimentation both greatly prefigured and, in some
case, actually influenced recent developments in interpersonal psychoanalysis …
and object relations theories…” (p.21)
Psychoanalytically Derived Psychotherapies
Over the century there had been a number of psychotherapies that had
drawn a psychodynamic basis from psychoanalysis, but extended it in such
various ways that they came to be not considered part of psychoanalysis itself.
Jungian psychology (also called analytic or depth psychology) deemphasized the
sexual aspect of libido and included spiritual issues as a legitimate area of
concern, extending the idea of the unconscious to include a collective aspect
through which archetypal or spiritual influences could be experienced, becoming
a separate distinct psychodynamic tradition in the early part of the century,
starting in 1912. It did, however, retain a full psychodynamic model of the psyche
and the working through of resistance as a key to psychotherapeutic success. A
key focus in Jungian psychotherapy is ‘individuation’ – the innate, evolutionary
tendency toward full manifestation of the whole being in individuals.
Psychodrama was developed by Jacob Moreno starting in the 1920’s with a
psychodynamic basis but very different methodology, drawing on theatrical
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dramatic enactments to evoke and work through unconscious material in a group
context. Adler departed from strict Freudian psychoanalysis in 1911 to focus
more on the psychosocial and on power relations (having, along with his wife, a
socialistic political background) as primary psychological determinants. While yet
retaining the basic psychodynamic model itself the Adlerians delineated
themselves from the mainstream of psychoanalysis. They have since come to
focus also on educational applications and have been successful in gaining some
university acceptance.
Reich, the founding psychoanalytic figure in the field of Character
Analysis, departed from mainstream psychoanalysis in the 1920’s with his
emphasis on body tension, posture, amouring and resistance. He advocated
direct body contact work on the defensive musculature, using breathing, exercise
and massage, calling this ’vegeto therapeutic treatment’, By the 1940’s Reich
had coined the term ‘bioenergetic’, which his patient and student, Alexander
Lowen came to use as the name of a form of body oriented psychotherapy that
he developed along with John Peirakos, who went on to develop his own version
called ‘core energetics’, which incorporated a spiritual element. These all
retained the core psychodynamic model of epigenetic, conflict driven psychic
structure, the working through of resistance or ‘blocks’, and also the typology,
extending it to include body characteristics. Malcolm Brown began his
‘organismic psychotherapy’ work in psychodynamic body oriented psychotherapy
in 1964 as a Neo-Reichian and colleague of Lowen, but also drawing on Jungian
psychology, Maslow (transpersonal), Goldstein (Gestalt) and Rogers (existential).
He came to focus particularly on embodied spiritual issues and ‘creative
disintegrative regression’, while retaining a basic psychodynamic model. Pesso’s
Psychomotor Therapy combines psychodynamic, interpersonal and
psychodrama techniques in a group context, aiming to correct early negative
experiences by dramatic enactment so that a different outcome may be created,
and spiritual experiences facilitated according to a Jungian model. The N.A.
Association for Body Oriented Psychotherapy was founded in the 90’s. It
provides a professional association and conferences.
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The Existential, Humanistic, Phenomenological and
Transpersonal Traditions
Through the ‘30’s to the ‘50’s, in both Europe and America, a number of
philosopher-psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts attempted to
incorporate ideas from existential and phenomenological philosophy into their
work. The philosophical works of Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger are
considered fundamental in this philosophical background. Hegel’s dialectic
model of human experience also contributed to the idea of individual evolution as
being mediated by the active, sometimes conflictual, dynamic between
complementary psychological polarities, a basic psychodynamic idea.
In Europe, Ludwig Binswanger, a psychiatrist writing in the ‘40’s and ‘50’s
founded the discipline of existential analysis by transforming Heidegger’s
concepts into psychoanalytically based therapeutic terms as Daseinalysis. M.
Boss contributed a holistic perspective to this in the early ‘60’s. K. Jaspers, a
philosopher-psychiatrist, expressed his existential views on psychopathology,
psychotherapy, science and literature in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. Victor Frankl’s
psychoanalytic basis was influenced by Heidegger, Jaspers and Binswanger.
Powerfully influenced by his World War II concentration camp experience, his
Logotherapy addresses neurotic behaviour as frustration of an individual’s search
for meaning, working both existential and spiritual perspectives throughout the
‘50’s and ‘60’s. M. Merleau-Ponty’s work on perception and E.W. Strauss’ works
on sensations also contributed to the field of phenomenological psychiatry by
Europeans of in the 50’s and 60’s.
The somewhat abstract, discursive, dispassionate aspect of
psychoanalysis was unable to integrate the experiential embodiment theme
inherent in the existential tradition. The analytic metamodelling and somewhat
rigid theoretical construction of psychoanalysis also mitigated against a full
phenomenological focus on individualism, and emergent experience as the basic
data of psychotherapeutic process. It was not until the explosion onto the
psychology scene in America of the, so called, “Third Force” (a term coined by
Maslow) of Humanistic Psychology in the late ‘50’s and ‘60’s, and the concurrent
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activation of the Human Potential movement that was part of the mid century
counterculture, that the psychodynamic experiential approach to psychotherapy
began to really develop. Various therapeutic models emerged from outside the
psychoanalytic stream that permitted a practical, methodological, techniqueoriented incorporation of existential and phenomenological principles, still,
however, modelling the psyche and guiding methodology in a psychodynamic
manner, albeit in combination with other traditions and developments. These
models included for the first time in the history of psychotherapy, an operative
focus on bodily experience and emerging self awareness as the defining themes
in therapeutic technique.
The humanistic/existential/phenomenological tradition has passed from
elaboration of psychoanalysis by philosopher-psychiatrist into a diverse and
eclectic range of therapies. Beyond the more formally psychoanalytically aligned
Daseinalysis and Logotherapy, these include gestalt, primal, focusing, Rogerian,
transactional analysis, transpersonal psychology and what is variously called
existential or humanistic or phenomenological psychotherapy or combinations
such as humanistic/existential or sometimes all three are put together.
The following account of the humanistic, existential and phenomenological
approach is based mainly on the articles by H. Urban and C. Fischer in the
Clinical Psychology Handbook (M. Hazen, A. Kazdin, A. bellack, eds., 1991).
While these traditions are distinct in some ways, there is psychodynamic
commonality, for example, in the general understanding of psychopathology. This
is viewed from the perspective of self creation, with particular focus on the roles
of embodiment and context creation as means of dealing with psychological
symptoms and life dysfunctions. The basic theme is that of being closed to one’s
life as a dialectic emergent phenomenon and attempting, by an act of will and
control or limiting one’s perceptual facilities, to deny certain aspects of one’s
personal reality or one’s social reality. This results in a condition which has been
variously termed split off, restricted, self deceiving, self imprisoning. This is a
psychodynamic model. Underlying the particular forms of blocked flow of life’s
emergence (which manifest as the various forms of neurosis and personality
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disorders) are themes of emptiness, meaninglessness and despair. The
psychodynamic maintenance of psychopathology involves sometimes a denial of
embodied experience, sometimes a denial of spiritual experience, sometimes a
rejection of relationship and social context. The theme is psychodynamic
polarization, with a categorical rejection of certain poles of human experience
giving rise to different forms of disturbance
For all forms of psychopathology there is seen to be an arrested
development such that present here and now experience and relationships are
significantly coloured or even dominated by personality patterns rigidly encoded
from traumatic past experiences and developmental deficits, a key
psychodynamic principle. Thus there is a veneer of expectations and attitudes
appropriate to past developmental stages that obscures the phenomenological
and existential reality of each present moment. Typically, people do not
experience themselves as having choice or responsibility in the creation of their
psychopathology. By focusing on the fully experienced reality of their past, and
by the psychodynamic recognition of how this is encoded in the present, people
may be slowly and compassionately helped toward taking responsibility, not for
what happened to them, but for how they have encoded it and how they
psychodynamically enact it in the present. This is a psychodynamic methodology.
Whatever the particulars of various therapeutic modalities, the
humanistic/existential/phenomenological orientation generally encourages some
common psychodynamic principles and practices. Therapists attend to ‘process’
and ‘dynamics’ of the client’s relationship with the world as co-creative and
representative of their personal inner/outer attunement, i.e. as self-expressive.
Therapists respect the ambiguity, complexity, and perspectival nature of
emerging human reality, while attempting to help their client find order and
meaning by a process of attunement and experiential insearching, such that
conflicting motives are not denied. The therapist recognizes the importance of
the therapeutic relationship as bilateral and mutual, and that it may sometimes
itself be the subject of therapeutic focus. The therapist sees direct experience as
the pivotal theme of therapy, self-awareness, and evolutionary change.
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Perseverance by the client through the anxiety and anguish of relinquishing the
structures of personal and world identity with which life formerly was
psychodynamically organized, and confronting and incorporating the essential
openness of being (the existential crisis) is a key determinant of therapeutic
outcome in these traditions.
According to James Bugental (“Existential-Humanistic Psychotherapy” in
the Psychotherapy Handbook, ed. Richie Herink,), there is a body of
implementing methodology with common elements. This has some roots in
psychoanalytic procedure, as it recognizes the importance of dealing with the
resistances to authentic being, but it calls for much more mutual engagement
between therapist and client than is characteristic of much psychoanalytic work.
The core of the methodology centers around aiding the client in coming to
appreciate the naturalness, power, scope, and incredible productivity of the
process of inward searching. This involves getting and keeping as
psychodynamically subjectively centered as possible, while opening awareness
to whatever emerges under the impetus of a feeling of self concern or personal
self interest, while maintaining an expectancy of inward discovery rather than
reporting to the therapist what is already known about oneself. This also involves
psychodynamically recognizing and relinquishing the blocks to full and freely
ranging awareness. These blocks are seen to arise from faulty and constricting
conceptions about oneself and the world. Finally, there is an opening of this
newly freed inner awareness to the kind of inner vision that permits actualization
of enlarged being with greater congruence of feeling and action.
Gestalt did not derive from psychoanalysis even though the principal cofounder, Fritz Perls, was a psychoanalyst. It combines gestalt theories of
perception from the 30’s and 40’s with elements of existential phenomenology,
psychodrama, theatre, Reichian therapy, Zen Buddhism and general semantics.
Its mature form developed mainly through Perl’s work at the Esalen Institute in
the 60’s, where it drew on the developing human potential movement with its
focus on humanism, holism, free expression and experimentation as well as
sexual and social liberation themes. It is psychodynamic in that significant
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attention is paid to the psyche as a dynamic, structured phenomena that is
organized into zones of experience around the themes of how one brings to full
consciousness, or not, one’s immediate, in the moment self awareness. This is
called completing a gestalt. Incomplete gestalts, called ‘unfinished business’,
function in an unconscious manner, calling for attention toward completion. The
personality structure is said to facilitate, or interfere with, the natural flow of
gestalt completion. Possible interferences are called ‘resistance’ and function in
the same way psychoanalytically defined defences do. It is said the primary
processes of gestalt therapy are concerned with psychological symbolization in
the form of such things as of language, imagery, dreams and abstractions of
body experience. These are psychodynamic concerns. Gestalt methodology,
while it facilitates a psychodynamic process of self development through self
awareness, utilizes significantly different methodology than the more
psychoanalytically related psychodynamic traditions.
Transpersonal Psychology began in the early 70’s as a specific outgrowth
of Humanistic Psychology (Maslow, Sutich, Wilber, Grof are considered
foundational figures), but also one that builds on the behavioural/experimental
and psychoanalytic traditions (Freud, Rank, Reich and the object relations
theorists as well as the depth psychology of Jung and Assagioloi are mentioned
by the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology on their web site www.itp.edu). In
the same vein as the psychodynamic tradition in general, it emphasizes holistic
development over the life span, though it specifically includes the spiritual in this,
as well as physical and social, drawing the holistic and evolutionary paradigms. It
suggests developmental stages beyond the personal (i.e. transpersonal) that
include states of consciousness attained by meditators and mystics. In
Transpersonal Psychotherapy clients are asked to look beyond their historical
psychodynamic conditioning so as to develop more flexible attitudes and mind
set. As well as the basic psychodynamic methodologies of facilitated self
reflection, things such as meditation, visualization, posture and movement
exercises, massage, sounding and music are utilized to take clients out of their
historically conditioned way of understanding and behaving. This frees their
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creativity for more comprehensive insight, more complex and satisfying self
awareness, more appropriate problem solving and more realistic life planning.
These are all psychodynamic goals.
Cultural Implications
“They don’t know we’re bringing the plague” (Freud to Jung as their ship
docked in New York, on their first professional visit to the United States)
“The true path is along a rope, not a rope suspended way up in the air, but
rather only just above the ground. It seems more like a trip wire than a tightrope.”
(Franz Kafka, The Zërau Aphorisms, ed. Roberto Calasso)
“When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after
a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about. I have no
fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc. because the painting has
a life of its own. I try to let it come through…” (Jackson Pollock, in Ed Hirsch,
The Demon and the Angel, p173).
Pollock’s artistic statement echoes the emergent, romantic,
phenomenological theme in the psychodynamic tradition, through which a new,
evolved sense of self comes into being. Freud’s and Kafka’s comments reflect
the profound deconstructive implications of the psychodynamic tradition, with its
diverse and complex 20th © parallels, for western culture.
In Secrets of the Soul – A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis
Eli Zaretsky (2005) shows the complex, ambivalent and profound origins and
impact of the psychodynamic tradition in the 20th ©. In summary he says that “it
played a central role in the modernism of the 1920’s, the English and American
welfare states of the 1940’s and 50’s, the radical upheavals of the 1960’s, and
the feminist and gay-liberation movements of the 1970’s” (p.3). Looking back at
its accomplishments over the century he says that, despite its decline following
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the 1970’s, “(i)n its day it had held together at least three different projects: a
quasi-theurapeutic medical practice, a theory of cultural hermeneutics, and an
ethic of personal self-exploration, one that was imbued with the devotion of a
calling” (p.11). He also calls it “the first great theory and practice of modern
personal life” (p.8), suggesting it is the hallmark, along with modernist art and
literature, of a second modernity which “viewed the individual as a concrete
person, located in a particular time and place, subject to historical contingency
and possessing a unique psychical life” (p.7), philosophy being the hallmark of
the first modernity, the Enlightenment, which the second deepened and
radicalized. He shows that the classic liberalism of the 19th © was revealed as
limited and was transcended in fin de siècle Europe at the birth of
psychoanalysis. “The emphasis on self control was challenged by ideologies of
‘release’ and ‘relaxation’ that developed along with mass consumption. The belief
in en bloc gender difference was challenged by the entry of women into public life
and a new openness concerning sexuality. Heirarchy was challenged by mass
democracy, trade unionism, and socialism.” (p.7). In this hotbed of social
upheaval, which, according to Zaretsky, was socioeconomically rooted in the rise
of industrial capitalism, the family and one’s social station became relativized as
a source and definer of identity, calling for a personally based sense of meaning
and identity. Out of this “defamilialization” (p.5) psychoanalysis was born. The
tradition of psychology itself was just beginning, with William James’ Psychology,
(1890) being the first general text and the experimental psychological studies
starting in the 1870’s with Willem Wundt.
The psychodynamic theme of a hidden structuring variable in a
mysterious, dialectically conflicted identity was echoed in other 20th ©
developments as the implications of fundamental and radical changes in many
fields settled into popular culture, with a widespread sense of the derealization
and deliteralization of everyday life and a pervasive sense of loss of innocence
and malaise. This was coupled with an ever expanding sense of knowledge of
what makes people the way they are, including culturally, and a sense of being
able to understand and treat psychological disorders in a more humane, effective
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manner. But this also involved more challenging knowledge, such as the theme
of paradoxical unintended consequence, a defining characteristic of the
psychodynamic tradition as applied to culture. For example, the 20th © gave rise
to an exponentially expanding technological mastery of everyday materiality that
both led western culture to a new sense of personal power and amazing new
possibilities for ‘the good life’, as well as, paradoxically, significantly threatening
our own, and the planet’s, well being environmentally.
With its roots in embodied, humanistic, existential themes and the
neurophysiology of bodily drives, psychoanalysis is philosophically and culturally
romantic. The Romantic tradition, as it developed culturally in the late nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, focused on direct, immediate experience, valuing
aspects usually defined as sinful or evil by mainstream Christian culture, but
opened up for investigation by psychoanalysis — conflict, depth, morbidity,
darkness, personal particularity, emotion, physical passion, sensation, sexuality.
The romantic fascination with the mythological underworld of repressed desires,
images and experiences, while being quintessentially forbidden in mainstream
society, is the essence of psychoanalysis, in its genesis. In this it evoked a
particular focus on eros and thanatos as originally elaborated by Freud, and later
Klein and Lacan. Another key psychodynamic romantic theme is the opening up
of boundaries, most obviously that of the boundary between the conscious and
the unconscious. There was, however, a general dissolution of the rigid
codification of social mores taking place in fin de siècle Europe that the
emergence of psychoanalysis was a part of. The psychodynamic impact of
moving Western culture’s understanding of human nature from a religious to a
psychological basis is radical, fundamental and deeply romantic.
Specific Cultural Traditions
In early 20th © art, the symbolist, cubist, Dadaist and surrealist traditions
all worked to deconstruct the everyday, naturalistic, linear, giveness of the world
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to reveal a hidden, non-literal, interior essence that has aesthetic, perceptual,
political and moral implications, surrealism being explicit in its adaption of Freud’s
psychodynamic model, especially in relation to dreams. Picasso’s L’Damoiselle
de Avignon(date) and Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase # 2 (date) broke
open the surface of everyday reality to reveal a symbolic, fractured, mysterious,
visceral interior that seemed to reveal more than the everyday given appearance,
while De Chirico’s work seemed to be the very embodiment of a dream and
Dali’s multivalent representation of everyday appearances and his frequent
scatological and psychosexual references are all explicitly psychodynamic. Later,
abstract expressionism, of which Pollock is a noted exponent, is also explicit in
its relationship to the psychodynamic tradition, including its archetypal themes.
Conceptual art, experiential theatre and happenings were constructed and
enacted around the revelation of the hidden essence of a non representational
organizing principle or agent, and attempting to involve the viewer in discovering
this, thereby enacting a psychodynamic process of self creation.
In early 20th © literature, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past with its
detailed psychodynamic rendering of the theme of the unconscious persistence
of the influence of the past, Joyce’s Ulysses with its stream of consciousness
flow of inner experience, Kafka’s mysterious complex self questioning oriented
toward discovering some hidden crime, as well as Mann’s Death in Venice and
Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers erotic, expressive, reflective humanism all draw on
and elaborate psychodynamic themes. Some of the greatest literature and
theatre of the later 20th century drew explicitly on the psychodynamic, existential
and absurdist model of human value and life, Henry Miller (Death of a
Salesman), Edward Albee (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), Eugene O’Neill
(Long Day’s Journey Into Night) and Harold Pinter (The Homecoming) being
some examples.
In early to mid 20th ©, the existential/phenomenological/humanistic
perspective and psychodynamic understanding of the structuring of experiential
phenomena had an implicit yet significant parallel in philosophy and its cultural
derivatives. This included: Sartre’s ‘existence precedes essence’ theme and his
30
focus on authenticity, Heidegger’s elucidation of foundational nothingness and
being-toward-death as the basis for a life of mature humanness by caring for
things-as-they-are, Husserl’s and Merleau Ponty’s phenomenological affirmation
of specific local actuality as the basis for real knowledge; nouveau
roman/romantic irony literature and cinema manifesting the explicit
psychodynamic awareness of the nature of one’s own self creation through an
absurdist, non narrative, non-linear, self-reflexive text style; Whitehead’s process
philosophy (and its elaboration into process theology and art),where experiential
events are granted more ontological validity than a, now seen to be, derivative
materiality, and God is both creator of, and created by, creation.
Absurdist, conceptual frame breaking movies in the style of romantic irony
also enact the psychodynamic nouveau roman theme of deconstructing our
everyday common sense reality in favour of an immanent metaperspective, in
which all content is recontextualized because the usual way of framing our
viewpoint is undermined. Movies such as Robert Altman’s MASH and Short
Cuts, Peter Weir’s The Last Wave and Fearless, Tom de Cillos’ Living in
Oblivion, Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, Emir
Kusturica’s Arizona Dream, John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness, Adrian
Lynne’s Jacob’s Ladder, and George Roy Hill’s Slaughterhouse Five all evoke a
visceral experience of the constructed nature of our everyday sense of reality,
conveying a sense of something unpredictable, visceral, extraordinary,
frightening and surreal underlying and structuring our experience of the everyday
world. This is a psychodynamic, postmodern, existential theme. David Lynch’s
Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Mullholland Drive and the TV series Twin Peaks
complexly evoke these themes, through portrayal of the sinisterly mundane, yet
naturally surrealistic, magic realism of the dream like implicit structure of waking
reality.
In addition, psychodynamic, existential, identity quest movies have
portrayed a theme inherent and fundamental in 20th century Western culture.
Movies such as Ground Hog Day, Grand Canyon, Being There, Orlando, The
Seventh Seal, Blow Up, The Passenger, Sheltering Sky, The Believer and
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Thirteen Questions About One Thing explore the absurdist, existential,
psychodynamic and postmodern fascination with the mystery of identity, the
problematic nature of intentionality, the synchronistic unpredictability of the
course of events, questionable innocence as both a source and a destination in
the ground of being as well as the themes of death as fundamental to life, the
acceptance of suffering as a means or vehicle for evolution and the existential
humanistic preoccupation with the pressing necessity of questioning preordained reality in order to reveal a hidden truth or, at least, to reveal the
absence of an easily definable graspable truth, leaving us with some
fundamentally inexplicable sense of the mystery of truth. Thes are all key
psychodynamic themes that have been elaborated over the century.
One other category of movies also fits the psychodynamic, postmodern,
existential absurdist, nouveau roman theme. These are the antiheroic, identity
quest Film Noir movies that reveal the seamy underbelly of the constructed
nature of socially mediated reality. Movies such as Happiness, Sex Lies and
Videotape, Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Big Lebowsky, True Romance and
Brazil all fit this description.
In the postmodern elaboration of the psychodynamic tradition, Barthe’s
‘death of the author’, Jenck’s ‘death of the architect’, Foucault’s ‘death of man’,
Beckett’s alienated humanness of endless waiting with nothing to be done, Joyce
and Burrough’s deconstruction of linear expository narrative, all echoing
Neitchze’s 19th © death of God and relativized subjectivity themes, further
elaborated the psychodynamic tradition’s undermining of a naïve belief in socially
mediated everyday giveness, empowering, instead, the psychodynamically
aware, experiencing subject as the definer, and ultimate creator of, identity and
characterologically defined reality, with, however, the dialectical paradox that this
does not imply control over self creation. This became a pervasive and complex
postmodern theme in late 20th © western culture. The psychodynamic tradition,
along with Critical Theory and postmodernism, has relativized heroic individuality,
with its striving toward completion and perfection through objectivity, instead
offering an irreducible ambiguity as the basis of an identity that is always
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incomplete, imperfect and ultimately empty of substance, being fundamentally
contingent, constructed subjectively and socially mediated. The acceptance of
this, and of an endless becoming rather than definitive being, is then seen as the
sine qua non of mature human individuality.
The early 20th century Bohemian forerunners to the later political and
artistic counterculture were often associated with and drew inspiration from
psychoanalysis, Anais Nin, Ascona (later the site for the Eranos conferences
where the leading figures in western mythic cultural thinking met) and the
surrealist tradition being three such examples. The explosive social impact of the
‘sex, drugs, rock’n’roll’ of the 60’s counterculture has a psychodynamic subtext,
drawing on the bluesy deconstruction of middle American mores and a
psychedelic existential personal reality deconstruction (for example, Dylan’s mid
60’s albums Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on
Blonde and the Beatles’ Revolver, Abbey Road and White Album),though there is
also a sentimental lionized romanticizing of the (anti) heroic outlaw and of
masculine egotism that is not very psychodynamic. Dylan’s “Something is
Happening Here, But You Don’t Know What it is, Do You, Mr. Jones?” is a
classic psychodynamic theme, as is the emptiness of recieved identity and the
reality defining nature of subjectivity in “Visions of Joanna”. In “Rain”, the Beatles
suggest an existential, psychodynamic model of perception – if it rains or shines,
I don’t mind, it’s just a state of mind. Other subsequent artists, such as Tom
Waits, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison, Nick Cave, Marriane Faithfull, Jane
Siberry, Mazzy Star, Lucinda Williams, P.J. Harvey may also be cited as
psychodynamic, existential and humanistic in their lyrical content and social
intent.
In the political and cultural field, the Frankfurt School’s self avowed
combination of Western Marxism with the psychodynamic tradition laid the
foundation for Critical Theory and the academic discipline of Cultural Studies,
with its stress on looking through what is presented to what is hidden in the form
of ideology, a cultural equivalent of the personal unconscious. These traditions
have had widespread, complex and profound impact directly on the academy
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and, more indirectly, on popular culture. Questions such as “Who is this created
by and for what purpose? What is the ideology behind this?” are sociopolitical
versions of psychodynamic questions. Psychoanalysts such as Wilhelm Reich,
Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm (the latter two both Frankfurt School
associates) made specific psychodynamic cultural critiques, in regard to, for
example, the mass psychology of fascism and how erotic repression provides the
basis of capitalist, consumerist society. The post modern themes of text, subtext,
context clearly resonates with the psychodynamic model in which the
unconscious is the subtext and history is the context for the text of everyday
consciousness.
General Cultural Field
The psychodynamic tradition has come to be a broadly applied
individualistic, humanistic and psychological lens through which to view culture,
art, religion, education, child development, with academic programs and peer
reviewed journals carrying these themes. In combination with Western Marxism
the psychodynamic tradition, particularly through the Frankfurt School, starting in
the 20’s, has contributed significantly to a critique of social hierarchies, racism,
sexism, social marginalization, ideology, epistemology, the power dynamics of
knowledge and politics in general. Through these themes the psychodynamic
tradition has participated in engendering a radical psychological revision of the
fundamental western understanding of human nature and how this manifests in
culture and forms of social organization.
One of the multivalent themes in the psychodynamic tradition is that the
conscious/unconscious relationship as the basis of psychology involves having to
take responsibility for a part of myself over which I have no control and do not
identify with – in fact, a hallmark of the unconscious is that it is that part of my
self that I disidentify from most viscerally. The phenomenology of having to take
responsibility for something that I don’t control but which belongs to me
translates in the social world into the question of how to deal with the alien ‘other’
– the marginalized, oppressed, excluded other that we nevertheless have to
establish a relationship with, and whom, initially, is likely to be hostile,
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uncooperative, even vengeful, seeking retribution and redress for historical
injustices, either actual or perceived. This alien ‘other’ puts the lie to our self
congratulatory sense of accomplishment and defensive sense of innocence,
classic psychodynamic themes. It is a guide as to how to deal with the fallout of
decolonialization, the end of western based empire as a form of global
organization and, within western culture itself, as to how to deal with
marginalized, oppressed people such as non-white ethnic groups and
homosexuals, and the radical fundamental challenge of integrating women into
public life that has been concurrent with the emergence of the psychodynamic
tradition over the last century.
This relates to another theme, that of perspectivalism. This has translated
into the culture at large. It is part of the romantic cultural tradition, starting in the
early 19th © , very strongly articulated by Nietzsche as ‘there is no preordained
truth here, it comes down to how you look at it’. This theme is the basis of so
many cultural developments that became prominent starting in the 1970’s, such
as postmodernism, feminism, gay rights, multiculturalism, egalitarian grass roots
politics and the elaboration of the counterculture of the 50’s and 60’s into
institutionalized traditions such as humanistic, existential and transpersonal
psychology, the human potential movement with its personal growth retreat
centres, the holistic paradigm, and the theme of East/West spiritual/philosoiphical
integration.
The deconstructivist theme in postmodernism is phenomenologically
psychodynamic i.e. don’t take things at face value, take them apart to question
their source, intention and implications. Similarly with hermeneutics as the
reading into a text through unpacking, teasing out, (re)intepreting what is
explicitly given – ‘there’s more to what you get than what you see, how is this
constructed, what is the history of its construction, by whom and for what
purpose?’ Foucault’s epigenetic reading of present day power relations in the
mental health field and prison system as being made evident through historical
review is fundamentally psychodynamic. The psychodynamic tradition has been
a major force in revolutionizing western culture’s understanding of personhood.
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It completed, along with Darwin and Marx, the loosening of the grip of dogmatic
religion and authoritarian Victorian social codes on the idea of how one should
live ones life.
The psychodynamic tradition, with its evolving understanding and empathy
for ordinary humanness( including human frailty, fallibility, ambivalence and
limitations) has tended to move western culture away from it’s focus on
perfectionistic achievement and control. The psychodynamic tradition is also a
critique of western culture’s dominant heroic mode of goal orientation, legalistic
morality and conformity as absolute guidelines for living, preferring instead a
more emergent, relativistic, relational, empathetic, forgiving, choice and
responsibility model. The psychoanalytic idea of the “good enough mother”
embodies this theme. Similarly we may see this in the recognition that counter
transference (the as yet not worked through parts of a psychotherapist’s psyche)
can be accepted and integrated into a professional, competent, therapy
relationship through responsible utilization of colleagues and continuing self
reflection.
The relativization of linear, moralistic, functional intentionality is also
psychodynamic in the same sense. In an empirical, moralistic, linear, functionality
based model (such as monotheistic religion, Victorian style liberalism) if I wish to
be kinder to my children, I focus on striving for kindness in my behaviour and to
exclude unkind thoughts and feelings from my inner experience. In a
psychodynamic model, particularly the experiential types, I become kinder by
accepting my unkind nature, not as something to be self indulgently, blindly acted
upon, but as a condition of my being, a characteristic. I am then required to bear
my inner experience of unkindness because the psychodynamics of taking
responsibility in fact makes it less likely to be acted out as behaviour and more
likely to be contained as experience. In the end, the essential unkindness I will
have to deal with will be toward myself.
One of the most difficult things for a goal oriented, positive thinking,
forward looking individual to deal with in psychodynamic psychotherapy is this
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profound relativization of intentionality that is explicit in the psychodynamic
method of change. While I consciously intend change and actively work toward it,
in order for change to actually happen, I have to accept, and experientially take
responsibility for, my deep, complex unconscious resistance to change – a
desire, in fact, to not have to change, but rather have the world change instead.
This is confounding to our moralistic and legalistic legislative regulatiojn of daily
life and to positivistic, issue oriented liberal politics. This dialectic, dynamic
revelation from the psychodynamic tradition has not yet been fully integrated into
public life.
A major accomplishment of the psychodynamic tradition, beginning with
Freud but then spreading to other traditions throughout the 20th century, was the
recognition of the sentience of the sexually aggressive child, specifically, initially,
by recognition of the persistence of childhood sexual and aggressive impulses in
the adult psyche. Through this model, and studies of child development, the
developing child has come to be seen as adequate and competent in its capacity
for sentient choice making and relational learning. This was originally elaborated
through focus on the oedipal period, but has since been extended by self
psychology to early infancy, and by Pre and Peri Natal Psychology, primal
therapy and Psychohistory through birth back into foetal life. Psychohistory has
shown that the late modern western cultural model of child rearing has become
one of cooperative service rather than instructive domination. This model
extends to the general field of psychotherapy and also to ways of addressing
childhood remnants in the adult psyche. This has all been initiated by
psychodynamic psychology, originally in the form of psychoanalysis
Another major cultural accomplishment of the psychodynamic tradition has
been a revaluing of the feminine aspect of human nature and the concomitant
liberation of women and men from stereotyped social roles. The feminist critique
of so many aspects of western culture’s inequalities and blindness has a
foundation in the psychodynamic tradition and has been particularly elaborated in
second wave feminism. This has contributed to, and drawn from, the fields of
Critical Theory and postmodernism, and has had profound cultural impact in the
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20th © in the fields of gender, sexuality studies, cultural studies, politics,
education and the general sociopolitical moral and legal regulation of daily life.
Julia Kristeva, a feminist and postmodenist psychoanalyst, was given the 2006
Hannah Arendt award for political thought. Simone de Beauvioure, a foundational
figure in feminism, was a close confidant of Sartre and a contributor to the
popularization of the existential psychodynamic reading of life.