Integration among psychotherapies and the future of psychotherapy

As society as a whole and the scientific world have begun to expect that the validity of psychotherapy be verified, a scientific and integrated approach to psychotherapy is the only possible answer. The development of operational definitions and the use of scientific designs represent the most effective way to generate empirical data and the only way to integrate psychotherapy objectively into general psychology.     

Psychoanalysis and politics

Abstract

Following the trauma of Nazi persecution, mainstream psychoanalysis abandoned its concern for the unconscious elements in social and political processes. The self-restriction was given a theoretical justification by H. Hartmann in his psychology of the self. The present author here sketches the periphery movement of an alternative “political psychoanalysis” with reference to M. Langer, A. Mitscherlich, P. Parin and his own work. His thesis is that if psychoanalysts do not consider their own entanglement in the social structures and conflicts that characterize their own time, they are in danger of themselves becoming, within their institutes, unconscious victims of irrational social influences, and in addition miss the opportunity to enlighten society by critical involvement.     

Psychoanalysis and time

Psychoanalysis is fundamentally related to time because it is an effort to understand how disturbances in the present are determined by events in the past. Technically, we know that the patient who is reporting immediate perceptions is not aware of the passage of time, but he becomes self-conscious as undesirable elements threaten to appear in his associations. Time is not sensed by direct awareness, nor is it an agent of action or events. Various functions of the ego influence how time is experienced consciously, leading to phenomena such as déjà vu, a sensation of timelessness, misjudgment of time duration, the experience of premonition. Psychoanalysis more than any other discipline sheds light on the coexistence of past, present, and future, as influenced by unconscious fantasy thinking. The analyst's understanding of the patient's associations is guided by temporal factors such as context and contiguity, succession of similar or opposite elements. Basically, the self is a time-bound concept; identity implies that a self is the same entity at different points in time. There is a deep-seated rebellion against the tyranny of time, beginning with need frustration in the infant and culminating in the knowledge that man is destined to lose the struggle against death.