The contemporary failure of nerve and the crisis in psychoanalysis

The American Academy of Psychoanalysis is undergoing an identity crisis at this time, which is at least to a large extent a function of the whole current identity crisis in the field of psychoanalysis itself. In order to better understand this crisis, in this article I have first reviewed a similar situation which occurred in the history of classical Greece. Plato's famous Academy underwent a progressive deterioration and disintegration and fragmentation, until it ended up merely the handmaiden of another discipline, Christian theology, for a thousand years. I then propose that the identity crisis in psychoanalysis today has to do with our failure of nerve in the teeth of the abusive behavior of insurance companies regarding the payment for psychoanalysis and the current cultural ambience demanding "fast-fast-fast" relief. I call in this article for a return to Freud's basic principles as a focus for our identity. Of course we cannot ignore new discoveries in neurobiology if they are well established, or what we learn from the study of enactments in the here-and-how of the analytic procedure. Certainly the findings of Freud that are contradicted by firmly accepted empirical findings in neurobiology and other disciplines call for revision of some of his ideas, as do his mistaken views on the psychology of women and on certain other topics such as art, religion, and evolutionary biology. But this should not be permitted to blur our continuing focus on the fundamental principles of the clinical practice of psychoanalysis as Freud developed them over his lifetime. In this article I briefly reviewed those basic principles and proposed that we employ them as the basis for our identity as psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychiatrists. It represents a failure of nerve to drift this way and that with current fads and with the continuously deteriorating ambiance of our culture as the world slides into rampant global capitalism. Franz Alexander said years ago that psychoanalytic psychotherapy is one of the last remnants of the humanistic ideal, focussing on the individual unique person and his or her transcendent possibilities as well as maladaptive pathology. This article represents a clarion call for a debate on the identity of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and what it stands for, which can only be clarified if we have a sharp focus on what we basically mean by "psychoanalysis." As Saul Bellow puts it (Atlas, 2000) in discussing the disappointing current situation for the arts and the humanistic disciplines, the intelligent public is waiting to hear from these disciplines what it cannot hear from pure science: Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for...the individual struggles with dehumanization for the possession of his soul, (p.462). Below points out, in talking about writers, and in a discussion equally applicable to psychoanalysts, that if we do not "come again into the center it will not be because the center is preempted. It is not. [We] are free to enter if [we] so wish" (p.462).