Developments in Psychoanalysis by Leon Salzman

This paper examines the evolution of contemporary psychoanalytic group theory and practice in the United States. There is a brief survey of the evolution of American group treatment, which acknowledges the work of early pioneers and the influence of theorists from other countries.

Over the years, divergent views have emerged regarding the value of focusing on group dynamics and interpretations versus individual dynamics in a group setting. Some of these views are explored.

The balance of the paper is devoted to summarizing the concepts of influential, contemporary American theorists who stress the unique opportunity and the theoretical base afforded by the group milieu in applying psychoanalytic understanding and working through individual and group dynamics therapeutically.     

Psychoanalysis and healing by faith

It would be preposterous to assume that this brief chapter out of my book tells all that can be said about the relationship of religious faith to science in general, to the therapeutic process, and to psychoanalysis in particular. The most that we can claim for it is that without cluttering it up with the excess verbal baggage of philosophical rationalization, it has stated simply some of the issues as honest men must face them. Certainly the history of the world has proved again and again that science and religion can both be perverted to amoral ends; but it is equally true that science and religion can both express man's search for the good life. The critical issue is whether they can carry on that search hand in hand, or whether their basic premises and their essential techniques are irreconcilably opposed. It was once the fortune of the author to hear a great religious teacher say in the pulpit that religion is a search for truth; but that as soon as any religion thought that it had found the truth, it ceased to be a religion. With such a concept of religion every scientist will find himself in full agreement. Unfortunately, however, among men of religion as among scientists, there are those whose spirits are so meager that they cannot live without absolutes; and in both camps they tend to aggregate to themselves a predominance of power. Apart from theoretical issues, this practical fact may make a confict between opposing totalitarians irreconcilable.     

Psychoanalysis,man, and value

Psychology does not seek to correlate independent happenings, but to discern in the manifold of a unique life, or of a unique culture, the pervasive sense or meaning which the life or culture expresses. The method is appropriate to the subject: a human being is not a string of lawfully connected events but an embodied meaning, an incarnated value. Psychology is therefore less like physics than it is like the critical interpretation of a work of art. It is psychoanalytical. Some of the traditional objections to psychoanalytic theory disappear in the light of this conception. Others vanish when it is realized that the analytic situation, being personal encounter as well as interpretative analysis, to some extent creates the being it analyzes.