Challenges for the Future of Psychoanalysis

This paper summarizes the current crisis of psychoanalysis in its relations to the scientific and cultural environment. It proposes tasks to assure the survival and contributions of psychoanalysis as science, profession, and humanistic discipline. It proposes emphasis on empirical research in the boundaries with the neurosciences and social psychology, and the development of an infrastructure for research linked to its educational program. It proposes renovation in training, abolishment of the training analysis system, and systematic teaching and research on the psychoanalytic psychotherapies focused on specific pathologies. This overall proposal stresses the need to collaborate and potentially integrate psychoanalytic institutions within university settings, and the development of active interdisciplinary engagements with other sciences and the community at large. Finally, it stresses the role of contemporary object relations theory to reunify the presently diverging schools of psychoanalytic theory and technique.