Since its beginnings, Psychoanalysis has been widely studied. It was initially created by Freud and throughout history it has been one of the most influential models to explain human behavior through unconscious processes. Freud had several disciples, some of them (Adler, Jung) had differences with him and decided to create their own model of Psychoanalysis. The contributions of these and other of Freud’s followers such as Horney, Sullivan and Erikson formed the bases of what is known today as neopsychoanalysis. The founders of neopsychoanalysis generally renounce the sexual theory of neurosis proposed by Freud and concentrate on other aspects of the person. In PsicologíaOnline, with this work, we review neopsychoanalysis and its founders, we also present the contributions of neopsychoanalysts to the field of clinical psychology. Keep reading and discover a wide review of neopsychoanalysis and its contributions to clinical psychology.
Introduction to the contributions of neopsychoanalysis to clinical psychology
The purpose of this work is to expose to the scientific community the main features of the Neopsychoanalytic perspectives since information about Neopsychoanalysis is scarce, sometimes excluding it from literature and the scientific field, despite the fact that the structure of current psychology has psychoanalytic foundations and aspects of personality that were initially designed by Neopsychoanalysts. Which are the contributions of Neopsychoanalysis to Clinical Psychology?, in this work it is pointed out that there are several aspects in the work of Neopsychoanalysts that can be considered as relevant contributions to Clinical Psychology, which is why this work emphasizes such aspects and we intend to make them visible for analysis.
Freud’s contradictions with some of his disciples were the first historical step for the emergence of Neopsychoanalysis. Among the first analysts who broke with Freud and developed their own schools of thought were Alfred Adler and Carl G. Jung. Both were first important followers of Freud, Adler was president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and Jung president of the International Psychoanalytic Society. They both separated from Freud because they felt that there was an excessive emphasis on sexual drives. For 10 years Adler was an active member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. However, in 1911, when he presented his ideas to the other members of this group, their response was so hostile that he had to leave to form his own school of Individual Psychology. Adler placed greater emphasis on social impulses and conscious thoughts rather than instinctive sexual impulses and unconscious processes. He later became interested in psychological feelings of inferiority and in compensatory efforts to mask or reduce these painful feelings. Adler considered defenses to be manifestations of compensatory efforts against feelings of inferiority associated with childhood weakness; the way in which a person attempts to cope with those feelings becomes part of his or her lifestyle. Adler spoke of the will to power as an expression of a person’s efforts to confront feelings of weakness stemming from childhood. Adler’s theory emphasizes the way in which people respond to feelings about themselves, how they respond to goals that guide their behavior toward the future, and the way in which the birth order between siblings can influence the psychological development.
Jung broke away from Freud in 1914, a few years after Adler, and developed his own school of thought called Analytical Psychology. Like Adler, Jung took issue with what he felt was an excessive emphasis on sexuality. In fact, Jung viewed libido as a generalized vital energy. Although sexuality is part of this basic energy, libido also includes other impulses for pleasure and creativity. Jung accepted Freud’s emphasis on the unconscious but added the concept of the collective unconscious. According to Jung, people have stored within their collective unconscious the cumulative experiences of previous generations. The collective unconscious, unlike the personal unconscious, is shared by all human beings as a result of their common race. Jung points out that an important part of the collective unconscious are universal images or symbols, known as archetypes. Jung emphasized the way in which people fight against opposing forces within themselves. He also claimed that there was a struggle between the masculine part (animus) and a feminine part (anima) of human beings.
Karen Horney She was educated as a traditional analyst in Germany and came to the United States in 1932. Shortly thereafter she broke away from traditional psychoanalytic thought and developed her own theoretical orientation and psychoanalytic training program. Freud’s statements regarding women made Horney think about the importance of cultural influence on neuroses. Horney’s emphasis on neurotic functioning is on the way individuals attempt to cope with basic anxiety, a child’s feeling of being isolated and weak in a potentially hostile world. According to her theory of neurosis, in the neurotic person there is a conflict between the three ways of responding to this basic anxiety. These three types, or neurotic tendencies, are known as approach, confrontation, and withdrawal. In the approach, the person tries to cope with anxiety through excessive interest in being accepted, needed, and approved. In confrontation, the person assumes that all people are hostile and that life is a fight against everyone. In withdrawal, the third component of conflict, the person withdraws from other people in a neurotic act of separation. Although each neurotic person exhibits one tendency or another as a special aspect of his or her personality, the problem in reality is that there is a conflict between the three tendencies in their effort to manage basic anxiety.
Harry Sullivan He never had direct contact with Freud and was the one who most emphasized the role of social and interpersonal forces in human development. In fact, his theory is known as the Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. Sullivan placed great importance on the early relationships between child and mother, as well as the development of anxiety and sense of self. The mother may communicate anxiety in the first interactions with the child. For Sullivan, the “self” has a social origin and develops from the feelings experienced in contact with others and from reflected appraisals or perceptions that the child makes of the way in which he or she is valued or appreciated by others. The self is in relation to the experience of anxiety as opposed to security, therefore there is the good self, which is associated with pleasurable experiences, the bad self, which is associated with pain and threats to security, and the non-self, or the part of the self that is rejected because it is associated with intolerable anxiety.
Erik Erikson one of the leading psychoanalysts of the self, describing development in psychosocial rather than merely sexual terms, Erikson emphasized the psychosocial as well as the instinctual bases for personality development; he extended the stages of development to include the entire life cycle and articulated the major psychological problems faced in those later stages; He recognized that people look to the future as well as the past, and the way they construct their future can be as significant a part of personality as the way they interpret their past. Erikson developed a psychosocial theory that emphasizes the mutual adaptation between the individual and the environment, underlining the role that Freud assigned to the ego, but providing it with other qualities such as the need for trust, hope, skill, intimacy, love and integrity. He considered the self as a creative force that allows problems to be handled effectively. Erikson considers development to be a lifelong process; his view reflects his concern for the interpersonal and cultural needs of the developing individual. He describes a life cycle of stages, each of which presents the individual with the tasks he must carry out. Failure to resolve conflicts at a particular stage makes coping more difficult in later stages. Erikson’s stages range from acquiring a sense of trust in others to satisfaction with oneself and one’s own achievements, as well as a sense of order and meaning in life that develops in later years. He was more optimistic than Freud in his belief that the ego could master both instinctual drives and environmental challenges, resulting in a life of relative satisfaction. Erikson was particularly interested in a person’s ability to achieve both mastery and creativity.
Among the most followed reworkings of psychoanalysis today is that of Jacques Lacan who bases his theory on structuralist linguistics by stating that the unconscious is constructed like a language. With Lacan, a new bridge is built between psychoanalysis and linguistics that revolutionizes psychological theory and practice, especially psychotherapy; which is why some theorists consider him the most important psychoanalyst after Freud. Wilhelm Reich also requires special mention, among his contributions to a new psychoanalytic vision of the psyche are: his interpretation of neurosis as derived from a reactivation of libido in his theory of the vital energy of orgone or bions and the use of psychophysical experiments and the creation of teams to demonstrate their theories and transform the mental states of the subjects in substitution of traditional psychoanalytic verbal therapies, as well as, for example, their so-called “vegetatherapy.” It is also necessary to mention, due to its importance for a psychoanalytic interpretation of children’s psychic development, the work of Ana Freud, who can be considered the founder of child psychoanalysis, and of Melanie Klein, who underlined the importance of play for the knowledge of the child’s unconscious and the role determinant of the mother in the psyche of minors. Subsequently, a strong Neopsychoanalytic movement developed that continues to this day in multiple schools and theories that make their own elaborations based on Freudian notions about the psyche such as the unconscious, instincts, sexuality, individual experience and traumatic experiences. (in particular…