Theme : Dreams

Freud: The Master... or a Has-Been?

Not long ago I heard about a publisher that balked at an introductory psychology book submitted by a respectable professor because it didn't criticize and devalue psychoanalysis. Few college professors, according to the publisher, will buy a textbook if it is favorable towards Freud.
The bias that sometimes misleads many academics in psychology is truly unfortunate. Personally, (or "IMHO" as they say on the net), I believe that no single person has had a greater influence on psychiatry, clinical psychology, and the field of psychotherapy, than Freud. I feel I would be doing a disservice to my undergraduate students if I didn't teach them about such indispensable concepts as the unconscious, defense mechanisms, dreams, and transference.

However, I believe that there are limitations to Freud's theory as well as a tendency towards orthodoxy within some psychoanalytic circles that is as damaging to the growth of psychoanalysis as any outside force. For this reason, I want my students to know about how psychoanalysis has evolved over the past hundred years - including such topics as ego psychology, object relations theory, and self psychology.

I also firmly believe in the need to integrate psychoanalytic ideas with those from other fields in psychology - humanistic theory, behavioral theory, biopsychology. One of my particular areas of interest is in the enrichment of psychoanalysis by integrating it with ideas from religious/spiritual disciplines - especially Eastern spiritual traditions like Zen and Taoism, which is the subject of my book Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Eastern Thought. This integration, I believe, follows the spirit of a multicultural education for undergraduate students.

Here's a book I would highly recommend for anyone interested in the history of psychoanalysis in the professional and academic world of psychology:

Lane, Robert and Meisels, Murray (Eds.) (1994). A history of the Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Original address of this text :

http://www.rider.edu/users/suler/freud.html

Please copy this address to the address bar of your internet browser and press the "enter" key.
(We prefer not to put actual links because often page locations change and then our log files get cluttered with error messages
- if the address does not work try to find it from the homepage of the website in question).