Understanding Dissidence and Controversy in the History of Psychoanalysis

Book excerpt: Dissidence and controversy have been an integral part of the history of psychoanalysis, at times causing pain, disappointment, and shame to its adherents. The seemingly endless dissent has evoked derision and thrown doubt on the validity of the findings of psychoanalysis. Now, for the first time, a number of distinguished psychoanalysts have met to try and understand this phenomenon. This volume, the collected proceedings of a single landmark conference, is a major contribution to the understanding not only of the history and nature of psychoanalysis, but also to the history of the ideas that shaped the twentieth century. essay by Martin S. Bergmann, which brings together the significant ideas of major dissidents in the psychoanalytic movement. Bergmann's discussion of dissidence in a historical sequence results in a panoramic view of the interactions between mainstream psychoanalysis and its discontents that provides a comprehensive look at the movement across several decades. The second part of the book is comprised of written responses to Dr. Bergmann's essay by Andre Green, Otto Kernberg, Anton Kris, Harold Blum, Jill Savage Scharff, Robert Wallerstein, and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. analysts named above as well as William Grossman, Peter Neubauer, Henry Nunberg, and Mortimer Ostow that touches on such wide-ranging topics as: the reasons for vehement disagreement among psychoanalytic schools, how dissidence should be taught in psychoanalytic training, the question of what is at the heart of psychoanalysis, the libido as pleasure-seeking and object-seeking, the limitations of psychoanalysis, the relationship between psychoanalysis and drug therapy, and psychoanalysis as science and as ideology. This singular volume illuminates issues that are some of the most troublesome and urgent among leading psychoanalysts today.