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| Chapter 12: Psychoanalysis after Freud: The Neo-Freudians, Object Relations, and Empirical Evidence |
- Freud died more than half a century ago, but his theory lives on and continues to stimulate controversy and argument.
- Many modern writers have altered Freud's ideas to various degrees through their summaries and interpretations.
- In addition, neo-Freudian theorists proposed their own versions of psychoanalysis. Most of these revised theories include less emphasis on sex and more emphasis on ego functioning and interpersonal relations.
- Alfred Adler wrote about adult strivings to overcome early childhood feelings of inferiority.
- Carl Jung proposed ideas concerning the collective unconscious, the outer, social version of the self called the persona, the distinction between extraversion and introversion, and four basic types of thinking.
- Karen Horney developed a neo-Freudian theory of feminine psychology and also described the nature of basic anxiety and associated neurotic needs.
- Erik Erikson developed a detailed description of the stages of psychosocial development wherein children and adults must come to terms with their changing life circumstances.
- The object relations theorists, notably Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott, described the complex relations people have with important emotional objects, and they observed that these relationships mix pleasure and pain, and love and hate. It is difficult to relate to other people as whole and complex human beings, and people often feel guilty about their mixed emotions and need to defend against them.
- Modern psychologists interested in psychoanalysis are bringing rigorous research methodology to bear on some of the hundreds of hypotheses that could be derived from psychoanalytic theory. Evidence has supported some of these hypotheses, such as the existence of unconscious mental processes and phenomena like repression and transference.
- A particularly fruitful area of research has studied the connection between childhood patterns of attachment and adult patterns of romantic love.
- In the end, psychoanalysis might best be evaluated not in terms of the answers it has offered, but in terms of the questions it continues to raise.
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