His Name is a Footnote in Scientific Medicine But Now Freud Belongs to the Humanities
After your training you may pursue careers in which the relevance of psychodynamic therapy seems remote (neuroimaging) or nil (bench research). But psychoanalysis is a milestone in the history of ideas. Not just a treatment modality or an exclusive club, it is a philosophy of mind. And perhaps more important, it is a school of literary criticism* and cultural history so ubiquitous that we barely notice it despite being steeped in it.
Dynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalytic theory can be thought of as the humanities of psychiatry. The cost-effectiveness of museums and orchestras, of libraries and arboretums is not obvious, but the world would be poorer without them.
A major contribution of psychoanalysis is its tradition of skepticism and applied epistemology: It follows Socrates' claim that the unexamined life is not worth living. The history of psychoanalysis is the history of an art that yearned to be a science. It is full of narcissistic characters, boundary violations, shameful secrets, quasi-religious fundamentalism and intransigent scientific claims. Yet, despite its many flaws, from the very beginning psychoanalysis tried to understand its own impediments (transference resistance) and to grapple with its own unique challenges (countertransference). |  |