Psychoanalysis: yesterday vs. today. Why we need to adapt to our new world

How do I start? It´s gonna be difficult to write this post in a way that everyone can ready it and at the same time don´t commit heresy by not being rigorous and awaken the wrath of my colleagues.

Also, I don´t want to get into the “politics” of Freudian Psychoanalysis and the  “war” it´s into against other branches of Psychology such as cognitive sciences.

The point I´m trying to prove is that Freudian Psychoanalysis and the people who study and has studied it  (including me) have some points and miss some others.

I think Freud was dead right regarding the dynamics of the unconscious mind (the existence of unconscious processes is not arguable). (mental note: avoid being technical) Once you understand the theory and articulate it, you can trace behaviors back to its´ elemental state. It´s a tool to comprehend how the human (animal) mind functions while in contact with culture.

The error (I´m not being modest here, sorry) I often see, is that its´ application to our “real world” (I´m really using those two words very loosely) often fail. And why do I think so?

Because some people tend to extrapolate the exact Freudian Theory to current cases. I could say that studying Psychoanalysis during the 1900s was a lot easier. Today we need to make an extra effort. Why?

Because Freud wrote at the end of the XIX century and beginning of the XX in a much more different society. With no mass media, no internet, no cell phones, no cars… and let´s not start about the social differences of Victorian Europe. Spring Break could have killed half of the Old Continent´s population of heart attacks.

Today, the effort we have to make is to dismount that carpet of social fantasies put together. We have new ones 100 years in the future. Our society is a lot different than that of WWI. We see the world, we interpret it,  in a diiferent way. We can´t pretend that the world hasn´t changed. We have to put the new carpet of our post-modern world on top of the naked roots of Psychoanalysis. Same basic rules of cognitive functioning still apply, we just need to connect them to our current individual and collective fantasies, goals, desires.

Psychoanalysis was popular because it addressed the exigencies that that world posed. And that´s a criticism that many branches of Psychology are making. We could even find something new, something we haven´t been looking for.

I realize that if I keep writing, this post would reach an asymptotic line on the “Over” axis. I know I´m leaving a lot of loose ends, maybe one every 10 words. But my goal was to address a point and stick to it. Lots of ideas come to mind but it would make this post lose its purpose.

PS: Flak welcome

Article by Fernando

This is my blog - I write about careers, talent management and organizational development. I've been featured at Monster.com, Alltop, WeBlogBetter and BloggingPro among others. I hope you leave this blog with more than you arrived and I look forward to discussing your ideas and projects with you. See you in the comments section.

Fernando has written 230 awesome articles for us at Fernando Tarnogol – Careers Blog

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