Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 17, 2026

Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effects of Self-distancing in Young Children
Published on: March 1, 2019
Strategic self-marginalization: the case of psychoanalysis
Jaap Bos1, David W Park, Petteri Pietikainen
1University of Utrecht, Department of Interdisciplinary Social Science, The Netherlands. j.c.bos@fss.uu.nl
Abstract:
Marginality is an important concept in the history of science, though it is often used in a manner that presumes marginality to be a static designation. We contend that the dynamics of marginality are crucial to the history of psychoanalysis, a discipline that has moved between dominant and marginal positions. We address psychoanalytic marginality via three specific "cases": the marginalization among Freud and his followers when psychoanalysis was an emergent discipline; the marginality trope in Erich Fromm's popular psychoanalytic writing when psychoanalysis was orthodoxy in American academic psychiatry; and the rhetorical marginality of psychoanalysis in Sweden as psychoanalysis entered a decline within psychiatry. Our aim is to show that marginalization and self-marginalization serve interpersonal, social, and professional strategies.
Related Concept Videos
Strategies of Self-Presentation I: Strategic Self-Presentation
Self-Presentation: Self-Monitoring and Self-Handicapping
Strategies of Self-Presentation III: Self-Monitoring
Horney's Sociocultural Approach
Social Foundations of Self II: The Generalized Other
Structure of Self
Components of the Mind: Id, Ego, and Superego