General Overview of the Psychodynamic Tradition P.3
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The Psychodynamic Tradition
Introduction p.2
General Overview of the Psychodynamic Tradition p.3 Psychoanalytically Derived Basic Principles and Practices p.3 The Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual p.8 Holism, Well Being and Personalized Care in the Psychodynamic Tradition p.9 Nature, Culture and the Psychodynamic Tradition p.12
The Broad Field of the Psychodynamic Tradition p.15 Overview p.15 Psychodynamic Mental Health p.17 The Evolution of Psychoanalysis p.18 Psychoanalytically Derived Psychotherapies p.19 The Existential, Humanistic, Phenomenological and Transpersonal Traditions p.21
Cultural Implications p.26 Specific Traditions p.28 General Cultural Field p.33 2
The Psychodynamic Tradition
Introduction
In this paper I will give a general outline of the psychodynamic tradition, showing how it is historically based in psychoanalysis, including in its theoretical model of psychic structure and dynamics, and in clinical practice. I will also show how it has, throughout the 20th ©, been elaborated and diversified, both theoretically and clinically, and that it is part of a number of different traditions, some of which are a direct extension of psychoanalysis and some of which arose in distinction from psychoanalysis. These are in the general fields of the humanistic/existential/phenomenological, experiential (which really arose within the context of the humanistic/existential/phenomenological field and should be considered part of this, although specific traditions do also have their own unique distinctive origins and formulations within this general field, e.g. gestalt), body oriented (e.g. bioenergetics) and expressive arts (e.g. psychodrama) traditions. While there are significant departures, most typically in the clinical methods employed to activate and work through psychodynamic material, all show a fundamentally psychodynamic model of the psyche and of the human functioning that relates to it, including psychosomatic, psychosocial and psychospiritual themes. I will also show that the psychodynamic tradition has arisen within a field of parallel cultural activation and that it has, in turn, had extensive impact on western culture in general. This includes such academic areas as religious studies, anthropology, child studies, political thought and cultural studies as well as art and literary criticism. It has also impacted on popular culture through literature (e.g. the existential absurd tradition and post modernism), art (e.g. surrealism and abstract expressionism), theatre (e.g. experiential theatre and 3 happenings) and movies (e.g. film noire). It has in fact become so complexly ingrained into the popular western mindset that most people don’t even recognize they are perceiving, thinking and framing things psychodynamically, or that such banal things as, for example, TV commercials often have a psychodynamic basis.
General Overview of the Psychodynamic Tradition
Psychoanalytically Derived Basic Principles and Practices
Psychodynamic psychotherapy is one of the three major streams of psychotherapy that came into use in the 20th ©, the other two being the cognitive behavioural and humanistic existential. While these are distinct traditions, it can be shown that there is a psychodynamic theme in these also. CBT, however, explicitly distinguishes itself from the psychoanalytic stream, arising in contradistinction from it. It does not use the term psychodynamic. The humanistic/existential tradition in general is much more intertwined with the psychoanalytic origins of the psychodynamic tradition, and even in those humanistic/existential modalities not developed as elaborations of psychoanalysis (e.g. gestalt), an extensive, complex psychodynamic model is nevertheless present.
The psychodynamic tradition is a defining feature of twentieth century western culture. It originated as psychoanalysis with Freud’s work on understanding and treating psychological and psychosomatic disturbances, what he came to call neurosis, in fin de siècle Vienna, particularly as it manifested in female patients. The theoretical and clinical model that developed drew on his attempt to reframe elements of German Romanticism in a scientific mode, based on his neuropsychiatric background, and combining Breur’s ‘talking cure’ model of treating hysteria with Charcot’s clinical experience in hypnosis. The original essence of this model is the idea that the human being mentally experiences life, and functions in life, based on the interaction of competing conscious goal 4 directed and unconscious instinctual tendencies, called the topographic model. More recently this model suggests that mental phenomena (such as thoughts and images), body phenomena (such as sensation) and intermediate phenomena (such as feeling and emotion) are created by the conflictual interplay of conscious and unconscious factors with environmental and interpersonal stimuli on a basis of physiology.
The early psychoanalytic hypnotic and free association experiments with patients in a reclining state of reverie led to the development of a model of human nature that included an awareness of this conflictual theme in an individual’s life experience and a focus on an unconscious hidden depth in their interiority. This hidden depth, while not present to everyday consciousness, had a significant influence in the form of unwanted thoughts, emotions, images etc., uncontrollable behaviour and unintended consequences, as well as symptoms such as depression, anxiety and somatizations. Patient’s dreams were seen to particularly reveal unconscious material symbolocically, making it available for working through by dream analysis, to be interpreted in the context of the person’s everyday life. Freud’s work had started in the 1880’s, but it was his Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, that attracted Stekel, Adler, Rank, Jung and others, leading, in 1907, to the formation of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Significantly, it included accounts of Freud’s attempts to interpret his own dreams, thus establishing a theme that is a cornerstone of the psychodynamic tradition – the involvement of the psychotherapists own person in the process, and the necessity, therefore, of undergoing one’s own psychotherapy as part of being a competent psychotherapist.
The key defining feature of the psychodynamic model is this observation that there is a hidden variable (the ‘unconscious’) which affects our everyday conscious thoughts, feelings, emotions, imagination, intentions, motivations and behaviour and is in conflict with our everyday conscious sense of self. In the psychoanalytic model, this dynamic structuring of the psyche is said to originate in several ways: (1) in how we have structurally encoded the past i.e. in how we grew up, including, in particular, the remnants of traumatic events and 5 developmental deficits, particularly how we have interpreted them – the epigenetic model (this is the first developmental theory of personality, based on personal historical progress through psychosexual stages); (2) in how we manage the inner conflicts between what came to be called the (instinctual, sexual, aggressive) id, the (moralistic, rational) superego, through the mediation of the (differentiating, pragmatic, relational) ego – the tripartite or structural model; (3) in how we manage our relationships with significant others, including how these are internalized as psychological ‘objects’ - the object relations model. All this is then said to affect the phenomenology of how we consciously take up our existential situation in the present. Although these models are variously applied with different emphasis within the diverse psychoanalytic traditions, and with even more diversity in psychoanalytically derived traditions (such as Jungian, bioenergetic), there is, nevertheless, widespread common use.
The model for the management of competing, conflictual drives, demands or tendencies is dialectic i.e. the evocation of the conflict, the holding of the dualistic tension rather than striving to collapse the tension into a single dominant polarity, dialogue or negotiation between the warring opposites, and the eventual compromise that gives rise to an integrating dialectic third which highlights the comlementary, rather than just conflictual, nature of the opposites. This requires the acceptance of paradox and ambivalence as basic to mature adult functioning. This draws on the Romantic tradition, particularly Hegel, and is a part of the psychodynamic tradition that is shared by many of the diverse examples. It has also become a prominent part of various cultural criticism traditions, such as Critical Theory and postmodernism.
The traumatic remnants, developmental deficits, dynamic conflicts and relational issues that are carried into adult identity are encoded in the unconscious and are managed through modulating barriers between the everyday consciousness and the unconscious. Various psychodynamic traditions identify these modulating barriers with terms such as defenses, resistance, ego structure and all suggest that functionality and dysfunctionality are significantly 6 related to the age and situation specific apropriatness of this modulation. In some psychodynamic traditions, the dynamic structure of the psyche is also said to be a way for spiritual or archetypal influences to enter everyday conscious life. It is thus said to have both a personal historical component and a transpersonal (spiritual or archetypal) ahistoric component. The unconscious is variously experienced as a deep, interior, subtle, hidden but powerful organizer of everyday consciousness and behaviour. It is sometimes felt to be mysterious, threatening, dangerous and forbiding. It is thus laden with cultural taboos and controlled by moralistic personal preferences or values.
There is a typicality to how any individual manages the everyday conscious/unconscious relationship that is more or less consistent over time. Though for an individual this typicality may change somewhat through life circumstances or modalities such as psychotherapy, there are considered to be a limited number of personality or character types and an individual’s typicality tends to be globally consistent over the life span. What changes through psychotherapy is the dysfunctionality of the personality, with symptomatic amelioration and a lessening of the ways in which the individual’s life possibilities are limited. The various personality or character types have been defined based on stages of developmental arrest (e.g. oral, anal) and typicality of psychodynamic style (e.g. histrionic, schizoid) or relational style (e.g. borderline, narcissistic). Body oriented psychotherapies, such as bioenergetics, also include somatic characteristics in this typicality. Some transpersonal psychodynamic therapies employ a psychospiritual typology based on, for example, mythological correlations, such as in Jungian and archetypal psychotherapies.
The psyche, then, is a dynamically structured, energetic, economic and relational phenomena that gives rise to typical thoughts, feelings, images, behaviour – a personality or character type - and under certain conditions of trauma, stress or developmental problems can give rise to signs of dysfunctionality. Changes to this dysfuncionality, both symptomatic and characterological, are said to come through insight into how unconscious factors 7 play into the everyday conscious self. Insight is mediated through the actuality of the therapeutic relationship as expressive of these unconscious factors, which, with proper attention to things such as characterological tendencies and timing in the process, can be brought to consciousness. Sometimes this is done through direct feedback offered by the psychotherapist, such as ‘intepretation’ in psychoanalysis, or through experiential exercises, as in the humanistic traditions. In gestalt this is called an ‘aha’ experience.
This constellation of a patient’s unconscious factors in a therapeutic relationship is called transference. The evocation and working through of the transference is an essence of psychodynamic psychotherapy. This is a therapeutically modulated enactment that provides the possibility to correct early life negative experiences i.e. for old, distorted, self limiting conclusions that the patient has come to regarding themselves, relationships, life in general to be reviewed and a new, more healthy, realistic point of view established. This requires the psychotherapist to strive to be consciously aware of his or her own unconscious projections into the therapeutic relationship, called countertransference. This means that they themselves need to undergo the same program of treatment and to have reached a minimal level of personal maturation before beginning unsupervised practice. It also means seeking ongoing supervision from peers where necessary.
Another very important characteristic of the psychodynamic tradition that began with Freud and the early psychoanalysts is the case study. Freud developed his theories based on conversations with individuals which he wrote down, interpreted and published as the early basis of psychoanalysis. Although this has been the foundation of some criticism of the tradition as being not qualitatively scientific, it can also be considered part of what makes the tradition unique and important – attention to particular, individual details of a person’s life, interpreted in the context of that person’s life story and having unique, individual meaning for that person. This qualitative method relates psychoanalysis to Husserl’s phenomenological method, and to the general field of the humanistic- existential-phenomenological tradition. 8
The Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual
These psychodynamic principles and practices are encoded in the recently published Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (PDM) which was developed to complement the more empirical and behaviourally based DSM (Diagnostic and Statistics Manual), which lacks a psychodynamic perspective.The PDM, published in 2006 by the Alliance of Psychoanalytic Organizations, came into existence out of a concern that the clinically rich and theoretically diverse, approximately 100 year history of the psychodynamic tradition not be lost to the psychotherapy and mental health fields by the adoption of a non psychodynamic, empirically based, research oriented DSM III and IV, over the last 30 years.
It is not well known that during the formulation of the DSM all psychodynamic input was deliberately excluded from the process. The empirical orientation of DSM paralleled a drive toward making the psychotherapy field more scientific through empirically supported therapies (EST’s) based in the research “gold standard” of randomized clinical trials (RCT’s). This meant that therapies that could be focused on clearly definable and measurable symptom groupings became financially supported by the emerging managed care system in the U.S. There was also a concerted push to have this perspective taught in psychological and medical schools rather than the more complex and long term psychodynamic perspective. According to the PDM website (www.pdm1.org) “the PDM is based on current neuroscience and treatment outcome studies … that demonstrate the importance of focusing on the full range and depth of emotional and social functioning. For example, research on the mind and brain and their development shows that the patterns of emotional, social, and behavioural functioning involve many interconnected areas working together, rather than in isolation. Treatment outcome studies point to the importance of dealing with the full complexity of emotional and social patterns and show that the therapeutic relationship is the major predictor of outcomes. They further show that treatments that focus on 9 isolated symptoms or behaviours are not effective in sustaining gains or addressing complex personality patterns.”
“The PDM was developed on the premise that a clinically useful classification of mental health disorders must begin with an understanding of healthy mental functioning. Mental health involves more than simply the absence of symptoms. It involves a person's overall mental functioning, including relationships, emotional regulation, coping capacities, and self-observing abilities.”
“In the last two decades, there has been an increasing tendency to define mental problems more and more on the basis of presenting symptoms and their patterns, with overall personality functioning and levels of adaptation playing a minor role. The whole person has been less visible than the various disorder constructs on which researchers attempt to find agreement. Recent reviews of this effort raise the possibility that such a strategy was misguided. Ironically, emerging evidence suggests that oversimplifying mental health phenomena in the service of attaining consistency of description (reliability) and capacity to evaluate treatment empirically (validity) may have compromised the laudable goal of a more scientifically sound understanding of mental health and psychopathology. Most problematically, reliability and validity data for many disorders are not as strong as the mental health community had hoped they would be.”
Holism, Well Being and Personal Care in the Psychodynamic Tradition
One of the chief foci of any psychodynamic therapy is not just the important goal of the alleviation of suffering and symptomatology, but also the question “what kind of person are you?” not from a critical, moralistic, conformist perspective, but from a humanistic, individualistic, psychological, liberationist perspective. This theme is variously termed holism, humanism, human 10 potential, individuation(Jung), mature adult functioning, self actualization(Maslow), fully functioning person(Rogers). This is again a unique feature of the psychodynamic tradition – caring for the whole person, not just treating symptoms. This is usually one of the main reasons the patient will choose a psychodynamic modality – the empathic, careful, skilled attention given to the development of the whole person. This feature of the psychodynamic tradition may be also spoken of as a concern with what it is to be an individual and what it is to be human, which goes beyond psychology into philosophy, anthropology and culture.
The psychodynamic tradition moves the focus of concern from “how should I be?” a basic religious and moralistic question, to the existential questions “how am I, how do I find myself?”. Based in these existential questions, with various ‘good enough’ caring methodologies and trusting in the self-arising, emergent, evolutionary tendency of the psyche, the therapy moves the patient toward healthy mature functioning and the fully lived life of involvement in the culture and the natural world that goes with this. This goes beyond traumatic recovery and deficit reduction. It provides the possibility for an outcome that is not specifically predetermined in a limited focused manner, but, rather, one that is emergently expressive of the particular unique, individuality of the patient. Definable, quantifiable, measurable outcomes that are predetermined in, for example, goal oriented therapies, become qualitatively realized, emergent outcomes in which the whole person is included in the focus of concern in a psychodynamic model. In this sense, the psychodynamic tradition includes the promotion of well being as part of the therapeutic process.
One of the paradigmatic defining features of the psychodynamic tradition is the special nature of the therapeutic relationship, with what it calls for from the therapist and provides to the patient. The psychodynamic tradition is not just a vehicle for delivering professional skilled help through a methodology that the therapist has extensive training in over several years. It is also itself the subject of therapy i.e. the psychodynamic therapeutic relationship becomes a place for 11 enactment of the patient’s internal psychodynamic issues through what is called transference – the projection of these issues onto the therapist and onto the therapeutic relationship. There is thus an irreducible personal element to any psychodynamic therapy, requiring that the therapist not only undergo extensive theoretical and clinical training, but also that they themselves undergo their own therapy in the service of becoming, more or less, free of their own neurotic or personality disordered psychodynamics. Through this modality, called a training analysis in psychoanalysis and Jungian psychotherapy, and through supervision, the therapist’s tendency to counter transference (projecting his or her own psychodynamic issues onto the patient) is dealt with, and they are better able to absorb and manage the transference projections without either deflecting them or over reacting to them.
The personhood of the therapist is thus uniquely involved in any psychodynamic therapy, the precise form of this and extent of this varying across a spectrum. The humanistic/existential tradition calls for a more forward, involved engagement by the therapist, while the psychoanalytic tradition is more dispassionately inclined. This requirement for the therapist to undergo their own therapy together with the, more or less, active involvement of their own person in the process of the therapy itself makes the psychodynamic tradition unique. In this it is significantly distinguished from CBT and outcome oriented therapies which are skill based methodologies requiring no significant personal involvement from the therapist and no requirement of the therapist to have undergone the therapy themselves. This human involvement not only requires skills training but also the ongoing questioning of what kind of person you are as a therapist. Supervisory questions then involve not only “what skills are you employing here?” but also “how are you reacting, how is your personality involved?” and then addressing any issues so identified. There is thus a potential for a special empathic kind of delivery of psychotherapeutic care in this psychodynamically defined situation. This is typically another of the main reasons that a patient will choose this kind of therapy. 12
Nature, Culture and the Psychodynamic Tradition
The focus on the natural state of the human individual is also extended in some psychodynamic traditions to include how we relate to the natural world. The humanistic, transpersonal and Jungian/archetypal traditions specifically include a focus on this theme in what it means to be healthy and wholesome (i.e.”what is the state of your relationship with the natural world?”) and making therapeutic suggestions that include dealing with this relationship through involvement with nature, and in being actively involved in caring for the environment. Institutions and organizations in these traditions typically mount workshops and provide teaching in this area. The field of ecopsychology has arisen out of a ground of ecospirituality, feminism and archetypal psychology.
In a similar manner, the purview of the psychodynamic tradition has also extended beyond ‘psychotherapy’ to what we may call ‘culture therapy’. This has been the case throughout the 20th ©. In various forms in the different psychodynamic traditions there has been a desire to go beyond just the individual’s problems to attend to the context in within these problems arise. This means not only family of origin issues but also the cultural system within which the family lives. Cultural attitudes to emotion, body, sexuality, touch, weakness, failure, success, discipline, ambition, for example, all impact on an individual’s psychological health. While this is directly mediated through specific family dynamics, the culture itself sets the background tone of parameters, limits, mores, codes and ethos. This is communicated, in a more or less imposing style, through, for example, the education system, but also through popular culture in general. This was a particular concern of the existential psychotherapist R.D. Laing who has written extensively on it and, through the Philadelphia Association, created healing communities where the impact of the distortions of the culture at large could be mitigated. The theme of community is clearly and specifically addressed in the transpersonal and humanistic traditions, both in their training institutions and professional organizations. The psychoanalytic tradition has contributed significantly to the humanizing and 13 softening of attitudes towards children, instigating a move from seeing them as little ignorant adults who need to be disciplined and instructed in a dominant style, to seeing them as adequate, sentient, motivated, evolutionary beings who are capable of learning through reciprocal, mutual relationship.
This theme then becomes that of having direct impact on the conditions in which individual neurosis and personality disordered symptomatolgy arises i.e. the socio political and cultural contexts. As well as the psychoanalytic direct input into disciplines such as anthropology, child rearing practices, literary criticism through academic studies, clinical applications and social programs, there is also the social critic and cultural activist themes arising from, for example, psychodynamic input into the Frankfurt School/Critical Theory/post modernism stream. This has been particularly impactful in 20th © western culture. In addition, in the humanistic existential and transpersonal fields, part of the mandate of training institutions and professional organizations is to be actively involved in the cultural and political fields, based in the idea that these are the conditions in which psychological disorders arise, but also that they are legitimate and vital areas of human concern in themselves. This is a long term prophylactic, epidemiological view that extends beyond care to individuals in therapy and to the culture as a whole. The Association for Humanistic Psychology’s active drive to bring a psychodynamic, humanistic perspective to Russian cultural evolution since the collapse of the Soviet Union is one example, as is the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture’s public programs, with their Jungian/archetypal focus on quality of life in the city. The Alonso Centre for Psychodynamic Studies in the USA specifically aims some of its programs at the general public as a way of contributing to, for example, family well being, and also brings together psychologists, psychiatrists, educators and organizational development experts as part of its focus on “human life”, (www.fielding.edu/about/alonso).
This psychodynamic theme of mutual, egalitarian reciprocity has undergone a parallel emergence in the corporate world, where business 14 negotiations in a progressive, pragmatic environment include not just a competitive striving for dominance but the recognition that the inclusion of mutuality and co-operation, as well as acknowledgement of unconscious psychodynamic factors, brings more effectiveness and productivity. In the general area of conflict resolution this psychodynamic theme also shows itself. Not just striving to defeat ‘the enemy’ in a militaristic drive for victory over the other, but recognition of mutual self interest and egalitarian co-operation as being fundamentally more realistic and pragmatic, so that more resources can be directly allocated to problem solving rather than the more immediate and limited goal of achieving dominance and only then being able to ‘fix’ things because you are now in charge. One key point in this is that the long term consequence of a built in reaction against being defeated and dominated is avoided, thus minimizing the subsequent possibility of revolutionary overthrow of the imposed solution. These psychodynamically related, egalitarian, co-operative mutuality themes are expressed in the philosophical and political basis of the European Union. The systems psychodynamics perspective combines traditional psychoanalysis, Kleinian object relations and Bion’s group model with systems theory to provide a method for addressing organizational problems. The psychodynamic model also highlights the need for addressing contradictory tensions between positivistic social and organizational intentions and the more obstructionist, defensive, emotional unconscious factors that come into play when people try to cooperate.
In the early 90’s a controversial aspect of the use of the psychodynamic model erupted around the social impact of the recovered memory movement. In this, patients were coaxed in a process of recalling abusive events (usually sexual) from their childhood that they had no conscious memory of, the psychodynamic idea of repression being used to validate the veracity of these accounts in subsequent criminal trials of ‘perpetrators’ that devastated families. Frederich Crews in Memory Wars, Freud’s Legacy in Dispute, (1995) was the most cogent and incisive in the rebuttal of the validity of this formulaic, legalistic literalization of the psychodynamic model, but his critique was part of a more 15 general questioning of the validity of the model itself that was emerging in the 90’s.
The Broad Field of the Psychodynamic Tradition
Overview
While the psychodynamic model originated with Freud and the early 20th © psychoanalysts, it has become part of all other 20th © psychotherapies in more or less explicit forms, and has been widely integrated into academia in various ways. The Alonso Centre, associated with the Fielding Institute in the USA, provides professional and public education specifically in the ‘psychodynamic’ tradition. Oxford University grants a Master of Studies degree in Psychodynamic Practice. In many academic fields the psychodynamic model has been fruitfully incorporated, including the Frankfurt School’s development of Culture Studies through Critical Theory, in anthropology, religious studies, child studies, feminism and gender studies, postmodernism.
In the 1970’s the psychoanalytic tradition began to fade as a cultural cutting edge in some significant ways. While being encoded into the emerging post modernist critiques of gender, power systems, hierarchy, epistemology, etc., it had come to be seen as limiting rather than liberating in some parts of the psychology field - a staid, maintaining the status quo, mainstream psychotherapy, repressive, hierarchical and stilted. This was part of the emergence of the “Third Force” in psychotherapy – the humanistic, existential, phenomenological and transpersonal traditions. There was an explicit, wide ranging extension of theory and methodology, a specific inclusion of the body, spirituality and social concerns and a distancing from the psychic determinism of psychoanalysis, as these traditions became much more experientially and expressively focused. 16
They drew on such diverse sources as gestalt perception theory (Gestalt), National Training Laboratory work/study groups (encounter), systems theory (transpersonal and humanistic/existential), game theory and general semantics (Gestalt), the holistic paradigm (transpersonal), theatre (Gestalt), Rogerian humanism and Heideggerian existentialism (focusing), the social and sexual liberation themes in the human potential movement (all), the integral tradition (California Institute for Integral Studies, transpersonal), Continental Philosophy and western mysticism (archetypal psychology), Zen Buddhism (Gestalt), Tantra (Core Energetics), Chinese medicine (Hakomi), Tibetan Buddhism (Naropa University, transpersonal), Eastern and Western spiritual and mystical traditions (transpersonal), secular humanism and egalitarian politics (humanistic), the return to nature and natural systems (all).
Training institutions were founded, some of which went on to become accredited graduate schools (Pacifica Graduate Institute, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, California Institute for Integral Studies, Naropa, Saybrook). Universities developed programs in these fields (West Georgia, Duquesne, Seattle). Professional organizations with their peer reviewed journals were developed (Association for Transpersonal Psychology, Association for Humanistic Psychology, International Transpersonal Association). A specific concern for the culture was included in theses traditions, as was a concern for the natural world – all part of the general post ‘60’s emphasis on the whole human being, in their own nature in the context of their culture and the natural world.
Even cognitive behavioral therapy, through its therapeutic focus on the relationship between behavior, cognition, affect and hidden dynamically structuring ‘deep schemas’ (that are hidden from everyday consciousness, hard to access and to effect change in), has a psychodynamic aspect, though practitioners do not refer to it as such and specifically disavow any connection.
One of the typical characteristics of these elaborations is that there is often a multimodal component. For example, while existential psychotherapy can 17 be clearly identified as based in the psychodynamic model and existential philosophy, it also variously draws on humanistic principles, as well as phenomenological, body oriented and, sometimes, transpersonal methodologies. It has a distinct holistic and systemic character. Similarly, Jungian psychology, as well as its very explicit psychodynamic basis, includes extensive mythological accounts of the psyche, drawing on Kantian and Romantic philosophy in its cosmological and phenomenological aspects, and spiritually draws on the Gnostic and Hermetic traditions. In its archetypal form, beginning in the 1970’s, it also includes Plotinus’ Neoplatonism, Corbin’s Sufism and the postmodern, phenomenological theme in Continental Philosophy.
In general, these new traditions have developed their own psychodynamic terminology, theoretical formulations, methodologies and body of clinical knowledge, professional organizations and peer reviewed journals, with training programs instituted to bring practitioners up to a shared skill level. Like the psychoanalytic tradition they have evolved through free standing training centres. They have, however, also become part of some accredited graduate schools, which grant MA’s and PhD’s in the field of, for example, Jungian depth psychology (Pacifica Graduate Institute), transpersonal and somatic psychology (California Institute for Integral Studies), phenomenological studies (Duquesne University), the existential/humanistic tradition (Saybrook).
Psychodynamic Mental Health
The term psychodynamic (sometimes abbreviated to dynamic) began to be particularly used in the last three decades in the field of psychiatry and mental health(e.g. Psychodynamic Psychiatry, Glen Gabbard, 1990) in the attempt to extend the psychodynamic model beyond the discipline of traditional psychoanalysis, which had undergone significant criticism for various reasons. These included its difficult methodology, its ‘unscientific’ basis and certain cultural attitudes (e.g. toward women and homosexuality), as well as the fall out from the ‘memory wars’ controversy that erupted around the recovered memory 18 movement, while Freud himself was criticized for distorting the clinical data that he had based his theoretical formulations on and his almost fanatical drive for conformity in the developing field, amongst other things. The general drive toward empirically verifiable, short term, manualizable psychotherapies that managed care was willing to pay for was also underway, leading to the ascendancy of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and various outcome oriented therapies, and, in the psychoanalytic field, to the development of Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (STDP). In Dynamic Psychotherapy (Hollender and Ford, 1990), oriented toward the psychiatric mental health field, the ‘pivotal feature’ is given as ‘the use of an understanding of the unconscious’ and the term ‘insight oriented psychotherapy’ is used interchangeably throughout the book. It stays close to, but does not retain, the specific, typical psychoanalytic spectrum. The Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual is in this psychiatric/psychologist/mental health mainstream, drawing significantly on psychoanalytic formulations and not attempting to include, for example, the existential tradition or Gestalt.
The Evolution of Psychoanalysis
The psychoanalytic tradition itself over the century had, nevertheless, diversified and broadened from Freud’s original formulations to include differing theoretical formulations and methodologies, some specifically dissenting from Freud while yet formally remaining in the psychoanalytic tradition itself. These include the work of Sullivan, Klein, Lacan, Erikson, Bion (re groups) and others, the Tavistock tradition, ego psychology, object relations, self psychology, psychohistory (De Mausse et al), relational and interpersonal psychotherapy, systems psychodynamics (re organizational functioning). The fluidity and interconnectedness of the psychoanalytic field and its psychodynamic derivatives is highlighted in a passage from Freud and Beyond (Stephen A. Mitchell and Margaret J. Black, 1995). “There were several important theoreticians who Freud broke with (or who broke with Freud) early on, including Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, and Sandor Ferenczi. Many of their concepts and sensibilities, although developed outside the Freudian mainstream, found their way back into 19 psychoanalytic thinking decades later, generally without credit to the pioneer dissidents. For example, Adler’s claim for the primacy of aggression and power was picked up by Freud himself in his introduction of the aggressive drive, and Adler’s emphasis on social and political factors anticipated important developments by “culturalists” such as Harry Stack Sullivan, Erich Fromm, and Karen Horney. Jung’s early concern with the self has been continued in the fields of self psychology … and object relations … over the past several decades. Jung’s other major concern, spirituality, was reviled for decades within Freudian theory because of Freud’s repugnance toward religion … But it has returned in the form of contemporary psychoanalytic theorizing that integrates psychodynamics and spirituality … Rank’s groundbreaking work on the will strongly anticipated more current explorations of agency … And Ferenczi’s radical thought and clinical experimentation both greatly prefigured and, in some case, actually influenced recent developments in interpersonal psychoanalysis … and object relations theories…” (p.21)
Psychoanalytically Derived Psychotherapies
Over the century there had been a number of psychotherapies that had drawn a psychodynamic basis from psychoanalysis, but extended it in such various ways that they came to be not considered part of psychoanalysis itself. Jungian psychology (also called analytic or depth psychology) deemphasized the sexual aspect of libido and included spiritual issues as a legitimate area of concern, extending the idea of the unconscious to include a collective aspect through which archetypal or spiritual influences could be experienced, becoming a separate distinct psychodynamic tradition in the early part of the century, starting in 1912. It did, however, retain a full psychodynamic model of the psyche and the working through of resistance as a key to psychotherapeutic success. A key focus in Jungian psychotherapy is ‘individuation’ – the innate, evolutionary tendency toward full manifestation of the whole being in individuals. Psychodrama was developed by Jacob Moreno starting in the 1920’s with a psychodynamic basis but very different methodology, drawing on theatrical 20 dramatic enactments to evoke and work through unconscious material in a group context. Adler departed from strict Freudian psychoanalysis in 1911 to focus more on the psychosocial and on power relations (having, along with his wife, a socialistic political background) as primary psychological determinants. While yet retaining the basic psychodynamic model itself the Adlerians delineated themselves from the mainstream of psychoanalysis. They have since come to focus also on educational applications and have been successful in gaining some university acceptance.
Reich, the founding psychoanalytic figure in the field of Character Analysis, departed from mainstream psychoanalysis in the 1920’s with his emphasis on body tension, posture, amouring and resistance. He advocated direct body contact work on the defensive musculature, using breathing, exercise and massage, calling this ’vegeto therapeutic treatment’, By the 1940’s Reich had coined the term ‘bioenergetic’, which his patient and student, Alexander Lowen came to use as the name of a form of body oriented psychotherapy that he developed along with John Peirakos, who went on to develop his own version called ‘core energetics’, which incorporated a spiritual element. These all retained the core psychodynamic model of epigenetic, conflict driven psychic structure, the working through of resistance or ‘blocks’, and also the typology, extending it to include body characteristics. Malcolm Brown began his ‘organismic psychotherapy’ work in psychodynamic body oriented psychotherapy in 1964 as a Neo-Reichian and colleague of Lowen, but also drawing on Jungian psychology, Maslow (transpersonal), Goldstein (Gestalt) and Rogers (existential). He came to focus particularly on embodied spiritual issues and ‘creative disintegrative regression’, while retaining a basic psychodynamic model. Pesso’s Psychomotor Therapy combines psychodynamic, interpersonal and psychodrama techniques in a group context, aiming to correct early negative experiences by dramatic enactment so that a different outcome may be created, and spiritual experiences facilitated according to a Jungian model. The N.A. Association for Body Oriented Psychotherapy was founded in the 90’s. It provides a professional association and conferences. 21
The Existential, Humanistic, Phenomenological and Transpersonal Traditions Through the ‘30’s to the ‘50’s, in both Europe and America, a number of philosopher-psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts attempted to incorporate ideas from existential and phenomenological philosophy into their work. The philosophical works of Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger are considered fundamental in this philosophical background. Hegel’s dialectic model of human experience also contributed to the idea of individual evolution as being mediated by the active, sometimes conflictual, dynamic between complementary psychological polarities, a basic psychodynamic idea. In Europe, Ludwig Binswanger, a psychiatrist writing in the ‘40’s and ‘50’s founded the discipline of existential analysis by transforming Heidegger’s concepts into psychoanalytically based therapeutic terms as Daseinalysis. M. Boss contributed a holistic perspective to this in the early ‘60’s. K. Jaspers, a philosopher-psychiatrist, expressed his existential views on psychopathology, psychotherapy, science and literature in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. Victor Frankl’s psychoanalytic basis was influenced by Heidegger, Jaspers and Binswanger. Powerfully influenced by his World War II concentration camp experience, his Logotherapy addresses neurotic behaviour as frustration of an individual’s search for meaning, working both existential and spiritual perspectives throughout the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. M. Merleau-Ponty’s work on perception and E.W. Strauss’ works on sensations also contributed to the field of phenomenological psychiatry by Europeans of in the 50’s and 60’s. The somewhat abstract, discursive, dispassionate aspect of psychoanalysis was unable to integrate the experiential embodiment theme inherent in the existential tradition. The analytic metamodelling and somewhat rigid theoretical construction of psychoanalysis also mitigated against a full phenomenological focus on individualism, and emergent experience as the basic data of psychotherapeutic process. It was not until the explosion onto the psychology scene in America of the, so called, “Third Force” (a term coined by Maslow) of Humanistic Psychology in the late ‘50’s and ‘60’s, and the concurrent 22 activation of the Human Potential movement that was part of the mid century counterculture, that the psychodynamic experiential approach to psychotherapy began to really develop. Various therapeutic models emerged from outside the psychoanalytic stream that permitted a practical, methodological, technique- oriented incorporation of existential and phenomenological principles, still, however, modelling the psyche and guiding methodology in a psychodynamic manner, albeit in combination with other traditions and developments. These models included for the first time in the history of psychotherapy, an operative focus on bodily experience and emerging self awareness as the defining themes in therapeutic technique. The humanistic/existential/phenomenological tradition has passed from elaboration of psychoanalysis by philosopher-psychiatrist into a diverse and eclectic range of therapies. Beyond the more formally psychoanalytically aligned Daseinalysis and Logotherapy, these include gestalt, primal, focusing, Rogerian, transactional analysis, transpersonal psychology and what is variously called existential or humanistic or phenomenological psychotherapy or combinations such as humanistic/existential or sometimes all three are put together. The following account of the humanistic, existential and phenomenological approach is based mainly on the articles by H. Urban and C. Fischer in the Clinical Psychology Handbook (M. Hazen, A. Kazdin, A. bellack, eds., 1991). While these traditions are distinct in some ways, there is psychodynamic commonality, for example, in the general understanding of psychopathology. This is viewed from the perspective of self creation, with particular focus on the roles of embodiment and context creation as means of dealing with psychological symptoms and life dysfunctions. The basic theme is that of being closed to one’s life as a dialectic emergent phenomenon and attempting, by an act of will and control or limiting one’s perceptual facilities, to deny certain aspects of one’s personal reality or one’s social reality. This results in a condition which has been variously termed split off, restricted, self deceiving, self imprisoning. This is a psychodynamic model. Underlying the particular forms of blocked flow of life’s emergence (which manifest as the various forms of neurosis and personality 23 disorders) are themes of emptiness, meaninglessness and despair. The psychodynamic maintenance of psychopathology involves sometimes a denial of embodied experience, sometimes a denial of spiritual experience, sometimes a rejection of relationship and social context. The theme is psychodynamic polarization, with a categorical rejection of certain poles of human experience giving rise to different forms of disturbance For all forms of psychopathology there is seen to be an arrested development such that present here and now experience and relationships are significantly coloured or even dominated by personality patterns rigidly encoded from traumatic past experiences and developmental deficits, a key psychodynamic principle. Thus there is a veneer of expectations and attitudes appropriate to past developmental stages that obscures the phenomenological and existential reality of each present moment. Typically, people do not experience themselves as having choice or responsibility in the creation of their psychopathology. By focusing on the fully experienced reality of their past, and by the psychodynamic recognition of how this is encoded in the present, people may be slowly and compassionately helped toward taking responsibility, not for what happened to them, but for how they have encoded it and how they psychodynamically enact it in the present. This is a psychodynamic methodology. Whatever the particulars of various therapeutic modalities, the humanistic/existential/phenomenological orientation generally encourages some common psychodynamic principles and practices. Therapists attend to ‘process’ and ‘dynamics’ of the client’s relationship with the world as co-creative and representative of their personal inner/outer attunement, i.e. as self-expressive. Therapists respect the ambiguity, complexity, and perspectival nature of emerging human reality, while attempting to help their client find order and meaning by a process of attunement and experiential insearching, such that conflicting motives are not denied. The therapist recognizes the importance of the therapeutic relationship as bilateral and mutual, and that it may sometimes itself be the subject of therapeutic focus. The therapist sees direct experience as the pivotal theme of therapy, self-awareness, and evolutionary change. 24
Perseverance by the client through the anxiety and anguish of relinquishing the structures of personal and world identity with which life formerly was psychodynamically organized, and confronting and incorporating the essential openness of being (the existential crisis) is a key determinant of therapeutic outcome in these traditions. According to James Bugental (“Existential-Humanistic Psychotherapy” in the Psychotherapy Handbook, ed. Richie Herink,), there is a body of implementing methodology with common elements. This has some roots in psychoanalytic procedure, as it recognizes the importance of dealing with the resistances to authentic being, but it calls for much more mutual engagement between therapist and client than is characteristic of much psychoanalytic work. The core of the methodology centers around aiding the client in coming to appreciate the naturalness, power, scope, and incredible productivity of the process of inward searching. This involves getting and keeping as psychodynamically subjectively centered as possible, while opening awareness to whatever emerges under the impetus of a feeling of self concern or personal self interest, while maintaining an expectancy of inward discovery rather than reporting to the therapist what is already known about oneself. This also involves psychodynamically recognizing and relinquishing the blocks to full and freely ranging awareness. These blocks are seen to arise from faulty and constricting conceptions about oneself and the world. Finally, there is an opening of this newly freed inner awareness to the kind of inner vision that permits actualization of enlarged being with greater congruence of feeling and action. Gestalt did not derive from psychoanalysis even though the principal co- founder, Fritz Perls, was a psychoanalyst. It combines gestalt theories of perception from the 30’s and 40’s with elements of existential phenomenology, psychodrama, theatre, Reichian therapy, Zen Buddhism and general semantics. Its mature form developed mainly through Perl’s work at the Esalen Institute in the 60’s, where it drew on the developing human potential movement with its focus on humanism, holism, free expression and experimentation as well as sexual and social liberation themes. It is psychodynamic in that significant 25 attention is paid to the psyche as a dynamic, structured phenomena that is organized into zones of experience around the themes of how one brings to full consciousness, or not, one’s immediate, in the moment self awareness. This is called completing a gestalt. Incomplete gestalts, called ‘unfinished business’, function in an unconscious manner, calling for attention toward completion. The personality structure is said to facilitate, or interfere with, the natural flow of gestalt completion. Possible interferences are called ‘resistance’ and function in the same way psychoanalytically defined defences do. It is said the primary processes of gestalt therapy are concerned with psychological symbolization in the form of such things as of language, imagery, dreams and abstractions of body experience. These are psychodynamic concerns. Gestalt methodology, while it facilitates a psychodynamic process of self development through self awareness, utilizes significantly different methodology than the more psychoanalytically related psychodynamic traditions. Transpersonal Psychology began in the early 70’s as a specific outgrowth of Humanistic Psychology (Maslow, Sutich, Wilber, Grof are considered foundational figures), but also one that builds on the behavioural/experimental and psychoanalytic traditions (Freud, Rank, Reich and the object relations theorists as well as the depth psychology of Jung and Assagioloi are mentioned by the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology on their web site www.itp.edu). In the same vein as the psychodynamic tradition in general, it emphasizes holistic development over the life span, though it specifically includes the spiritual in this, as well as physical and social, drawing the holistic and evolutionary paradigms. It suggests developmental stages beyond the personal (i.e. transpersonal) that include states of consciousness attained by meditators and mystics. In Transpersonal Psychotherapy clients are asked to look beyond their historical psychodynamic conditioning so as to develop more flexible attitudes and mind set. As well as the basic psychodynamic methodologies of facilitated self reflection, things such as meditation, visualization, posture and movement exercises, massage, sounding and music are utilized to take clients out of their historically conditioned way of understanding and behaving. This frees their 26 creativity for more comprehensive insight, more complex and satisfying self awareness, more appropriate problem solving and more realistic life planning. These are all psychodynamic goals.
Cultural Implications
“They don’t know we’re bringing the plague” (Freud to Jung as their ship docked in New York, on their first professional visit to the United States)
“The true path is along a rope, not a rope suspended way up in the air, but rather only just above the ground. It seems more like a trip wire than a tightrope.” (Franz Kafka, The Zërau Aphorisms, ed. Roberto Calasso)
“When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc. because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through…” (Jackson Pollock, in Ed Hirsch, The Demon and the Angel, p173).
Pollock’s artistic statement echoes the emergent, romantic, phenomenological theme in the psychodynamic tradition, through which a new, evolved sense of self comes into being. Freud’s and Kafka’s comments reflect the profound deconstructive implications of the psychodynamic tradition, with its diverse and complex 20th © parallels, for western culture.
In Secrets of the Soul – A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis Eli Zaretsky (2005) shows the complex, ambivalent and profound origins and impact of the psychodynamic tradition in the 20th ©. In summary he says that “it played a central role in the modernism of the 1920’s, the English and American welfare states of the 1940’s and 50’s, the radical upheavals of the 1960’s, and the feminist and gay-liberation movements of the 1970’s” (p.3). Looking back at its accomplishments over the century he says that, despite its decline following 27 the 1970’s, “(i)n its day it had held together at least three different projects: a quasi-theurapeutic medical practice, a theory of cultural hermeneutics, and an ethic of personal self-exploration, one that was imbued with the devotion of a calling” (p.11). He also calls it “the first great theory and practice of modern personal life” (p.8), suggesting it is the hallmark, along with modernist art and literature, of a second modernity which “viewed the individual as a concrete person, located in a particular time and place, subject to historical contingency and possessing a unique psychical life” (p.7), philosophy being the hallmark of the first modernity, the Enlightenment, which the second deepened and radicalized. He shows that the classic liberalism of the 19th © was revealed as limited and was transcended in fin de siècle Europe at the birth of psychoanalysis. “The emphasis on self control was challenged by ideologies of ‘release’ and ‘relaxation’ that developed along with mass consumption. The belief in en bloc gender difference was challenged by the entry of women into public life and a new openness concerning sexuality. Heirarchy was challenged by mass democracy, trade unionism, and socialism.” (p.7). In this hotbed of social upheaval, which, according to Zaretsky, was socioeconomically rooted in the rise of industrial capitalism, the family and one’s social station became relativized as a source and definer of identity, calling for a personally based sense of meaning and identity. Out of this “defamilialization” (p.5) psychoanalysis was born. The tradition of psychology itself was just beginning, with William James’ Psychology, (1890) being the first general text and the experimental psychological studies starting in the 1870’s with Willem Wundt.
The psychodynamic theme of a hidden structuring variable in a mysterious, dialectically conflicted identity was echoed in other 20th © developments as the implications of fundamental and radical changes in many fields settled into popular culture, with a widespread sense of the derealization and deliteralization of everyday life and a pervasive sense of loss of innocence and malaise. This was coupled with an ever expanding sense of knowledge of what makes people the way they are, including culturally, and a sense of being able to understand and treat psychological disorders in a more humane, effective 28 manner. But this also involved more challenging knowledge, such as the theme of paradoxical unintended consequence, a defining characteristic of the psychodynamic tradition as applied to culture. For example, the 20th © gave rise to an exponentially expanding technological mastery of everyday materiality that both led western culture to a new sense of personal power and amazing new possibilities for ‘the good life’, as well as, paradoxically, significantly threatening our own, and the planet’s, well being environmentally.
With its roots in embodied, humanistic, existential themes and the neurophysiology of bodily drives, psychoanalysis is philosophically and culturally romantic. The Romantic tradition, as it developed culturally in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focused on direct, immediate experience, valuing aspects usually defined as sinful or evil by mainstream Christian culture, but opened up for investigation by psychoanalysis — conflict, depth, morbidity, darkness, personal particularity, emotion, physical passion, sensation, sexuality. The romantic fascination with the mythological underworld of repressed desires, images and experiences, while being quintessentially forbidden in mainstream society, is the essence of psychoanalysis, in its genesis. In this it evoked a particular focus on eros and thanatos as originally elaborated by Freud, and later Klein and Lacan. Another key psychodynamic romantic theme is the opening up of boundaries, most obviously that of the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious. There was, however, a general dissolution of the rigid codification of social mores taking place in fin de siècle Europe that the emergence of psychoanalysis was a part of. The psychodynamic impact of moving Western culture’s understanding of human nature from a religious to a psychological basis is radical, fundamental and deeply romantic.
Specific Cultural Traditions
In early 20th © art, the symbolist, cubist, Dadaist and surrealist traditions all worked to deconstruct the everyday, naturalistic, linear, giveness of the world 29 to reveal a hidden, non-literal, interior essence that has aesthetic, perceptual, political and moral implications, surrealism being explicit in its adaption of Freud’s psychodynamic model, especially in relation to dreams. Picasso’s L’Damoiselle de Avignon(date) and Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase # 2 (date) broke open the surface of everyday reality to reveal a symbolic, fractured, mysterious, visceral interior that seemed to reveal more than the everyday given appearance, while De Chirico’s work seemed to be the very embodiment of a dream and Dali’s multivalent representation of everyday appearances and his frequent scatological and psychosexual references are all explicitly psychodynamic. Later, abstract expressionism, of which Pollock is a noted exponent, is also explicit in its relationship to the psychodynamic tradition, including its archetypal themes. Conceptual art, experiential theatre and happenings were constructed and enacted around the revelation of the hidden essence of a non representational organizing principle or agent, and attempting to involve the viewer in discovering this, thereby enacting a psychodynamic process of self creation.
In early 20th © literature, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past with its detailed psychodynamic rendering of the theme of the unconscious persistence of the influence of the past, Joyce’s Ulysses with its stream of consciousness flow of inner experience, Kafka’s mysterious complex self questioning oriented toward discovering some hidden crime, as well as Mann’s Death in Venice and Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers erotic, expressive, reflective humanism all draw on and elaborate psychodynamic themes. Some of the greatest literature and theatre of the later 20th century drew explicitly on the psychodynamic, existential and absurdist model of human value and life, Henry Miller (Death of a Salesman), Edward Albee (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), Eugene O’Neill (Long Day’s Journey Into Night) and Harold Pinter (The Homecoming) being some examples.
In early to mid 20th ©, the existential/phenomenological/humanistic perspective and psychodynamic understanding of the structuring of experiential phenomena had an implicit yet significant parallel in philosophy and its cultural derivatives. This included: Sartre’s ‘existence precedes essence’ theme and his 30 focus on authenticity, Heidegger’s elucidation of foundational nothingness and being-toward-death as the basis for a life of mature humanness by caring for things-as-they-are, Husserl’s and Merleau Ponty’s phenomenological affirmation of specific local actuality as the basis for real knowledge; nouveau roman/romantic irony literature and cinema manifesting the explicit psychodynamic awareness of the nature of one’s own self creation through an absurdist, non narrative, non-linear, self-reflexive text style; Whitehead’s process philosophy (and its elaboration into process theology and art),where experiential events are granted more ontological validity than a, now seen to be, derivative materiality, and God is both creator of, and created by, creation.
Absurdist, conceptual frame breaking movies in the style of romantic irony also enact the psychodynamic nouveau roman theme of deconstructing our everyday common sense reality in favour of an immanent metaperspective, in which all content is recontextualized because the usual way of framing our viewpoint is undermined. Movies such as Robert Altman’s MASH and Short Cuts, Peter Weir’s The Last Wave and Fearless, Tom de Cillos’ Living in Oblivion, Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, Emir Kusturica’s Arizona Dream, John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness, Adrian Lynne’s Jacob’s Ladder, and George Roy Hill’s Slaughterhouse Five all evoke a visceral experience of the constructed nature of our everyday sense of reality, conveying a sense of something unpredictable, visceral, extraordinary, frightening and surreal underlying and structuring our experience of the everyday world. This is a psychodynamic, postmodern, existential theme. David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Mullholland Drive and the TV series Twin Peaks complexly evoke these themes, through portrayal of the sinisterly mundane, yet naturally surrealistic, magic realism of the dream like implicit structure of waking reality. In addition, psychodynamic, existential, identity quest movies have portrayed a theme inherent and fundamental in 20th century Western culture. Movies such as Ground Hog Day, Grand Canyon, Being There, Orlando, The Seventh Seal, Blow Up, The Passenger, Sheltering Sky, The Believer and 31
Thirteen Questions About One Thing explore the absurdist, existential, psychodynamic and postmodern fascination with the mystery of identity, the problematic nature of intentionality, the synchronistic unpredictability of the course of events, questionable innocence as both a source and a destination in the ground of being as well as the themes of death as fundamental to life, the acceptance of suffering as a means or vehicle for evolution and the existential humanistic preoccupation with the pressing necessity of questioning pre- ordained reality in order to reveal a hidden truth or, at least, to reveal the absence of an easily definable graspable truth, leaving us with some fundamentally inexplicable sense of the mystery of truth. Thes are all key psychodynamic themes that have been elaborated over the century. One other category of movies also fits the psychodynamic, postmodern, existential absurdist, nouveau roman theme. These are the antiheroic, identity quest Film Noir movies that reveal the seamy underbelly of the constructed nature of socially mediated reality. Movies such as Happiness, Sex Lies and Videotape, Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Big Lebowsky, True Romance and Brazil all fit this description. In the postmodern elaboration of the psychodynamic tradition, Barthe’s ‘death of the author’, Jenck’s ‘death of the architect’, Foucault’s ‘death of man’, Beckett’s alienated humanness of endless waiting with nothing to be done, Joyce and Burrough’s deconstruction of linear expository narrative, all echoing Neitchze’s 19th © death of God and relativized subjectivity themes, further elaborated the psychodynamic tradition’s undermining of a naïve belief in socially mediated everyday giveness, empowering, instead, the psychodynamically aware, experiencing subject as the definer, and ultimate creator of, identity and characterologically defined reality, with, however, the dialectical paradox that this does not imply control over self creation. This became a pervasive and complex postmodern theme in late 20th © western culture. The psychodynamic tradition, along with Critical Theory and postmodernism, has relativized heroic individuality, with its striving toward completion and perfection through objectivity, instead offering an irreducible ambiguity as the basis of an identity that is always 32 incomplete, imperfect and ultimately empty of substance, being fundamentally contingent, constructed subjectively and socially mediated. The acceptance of this, and of an endless becoming rather than definitive being, is then seen as the sine qua non of mature human individuality.
The early 20th century Bohemian forerunners to the later political and artistic counterculture were often associated with and drew inspiration from psychoanalysis, Anais Nin, Ascona (later the site for the Eranos conferences where the leading figures in western mythic cultural thinking met) and the surrealist tradition being three such examples. The explosive social impact of the ‘sex, drugs, rock’n’roll’ of the 60’s counterculture has a psychodynamic subtext, drawing on the bluesy deconstruction of middle American mores and a psychedelic existential personal reality deconstruction (for example, Dylan’s mid 60’s albums Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde and the Beatles’ Revolver, Abbey Road and White Album),though there is also a sentimental lionized romanticizing of the (anti) heroic outlaw and of masculine egotism that is not very psychodynamic. Dylan’s “Something is Happening Here, But You Don’t Know What it is, Do You, Mr. Jones?” is a classic psychodynamic theme, as is the emptiness of recieved identity and the reality defining nature of subjectivity in “Visions of Joanna”. In “Rain”, the Beatles suggest an existential, psychodynamic model of perception – if it rains or shines, I don’t mind, it’s just a state of mind. Other subsequent artists, such as Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison, Nick Cave, Marriane Faithfull, Jane Siberry, Mazzy Star, Lucinda Williams, P.J. Harvey may also be cited as psychodynamic, existential and humanistic in their lyrical content and social intent.
In the political and cultural field, the Frankfurt School’s self avowed combination of Western Marxism with the psychodynamic tradition laid the foundation for Critical Theory and the academic discipline of Cultural Studies, with its stress on looking through what is presented to what is hidden in the form of ideology, a cultural equivalent of the personal unconscious. These traditions have had widespread, complex and profound impact directly on the academy 33 and, more indirectly, on popular culture. Questions such as “Who is this created by and for what purpose? What is the ideology behind this?” are sociopolitical versions of psychodynamic questions. Psychoanalysts such as Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm (the latter two both Frankfurt School associates) made specific psychodynamic cultural critiques, in regard to, for example, the mass psychology of fascism and how erotic repression provides the basis of capitalist, consumerist society. The post modern themes of text, subtext, context clearly resonates with the psychodynamic model in which the unconscious is the subtext and history is the context for the text of everyday consciousness. General Cultural Field The psychodynamic tradition has come to be a broadly applied individualistic, humanistic and psychological lens through which to view culture, art, religion, education, child development, with academic programs and peer reviewed journals carrying these themes. In combination with Western Marxism the psychodynamic tradition, particularly through the Frankfurt School, starting in the 20’s, has contributed significantly to a critique of social hierarchies, racism, sexism, social marginalization, ideology, epistemology, the power dynamics of knowledge and politics in general. Through these themes the psychodynamic tradition has participated in engendering a radical psychological revision of the fundamental western understanding of human nature and how this manifests in culture and forms of social organization.
One of the multivalent themes in the psychodynamic tradition is that the conscious/unconscious relationship as the basis of psychology involves having to take responsibility for a part of myself over which I have no control and do not identify with – in fact, a hallmark of the unconscious is that it is that part of my self that I disidentify from most viscerally. The phenomenology of having to take responsibility for something that I don’t control but which belongs to me translates in the social world into the question of how to deal with the alien ‘other’ – the marginalized, oppressed, excluded other that we nevertheless have to establish a relationship with, and whom, initially, is likely to be hostile, 34 uncooperative, even vengeful, seeking retribution and redress for historical injustices, either actual or perceived. This alien ‘other’ puts the lie to our self congratulatory sense of accomplishment and defensive sense of innocence, classic psychodynamic themes. It is a guide as to how to deal with the fallout of decolonialization, the end of western based empire as a form of global organization and, within western culture itself, as to how to deal with marginalized, oppressed people such as non-white ethnic groups and homosexuals, and the radical fundamental challenge of integrating women into public life that has been concurrent with the emergence of the psychodynamic tradition over the last century.
This relates to another theme, that of perspectivalism. This has translated into the culture at large. It is part of the romantic cultural tradition, starting in the early 19th © , very strongly articulated by Nietzsche as ‘there is no preordained truth here, it comes down to how you look at it’. This theme is the basis of so many cultural developments that became prominent starting in the 1970’s, such as postmodernism, feminism, gay rights, multiculturalism, egalitarian grass roots politics and the elaboration of the counterculture of the 50’s and 60’s into institutionalized traditions such as humanistic, existential and transpersonal psychology, the human potential movement with its personal growth retreat centres, the holistic paradigm, and the theme of East/West spiritual/philosoiphical integration.
The deconstructivist theme in postmodernism is phenomenologically psychodynamic i.e. don’t take things at face value, take them apart to question their source, intention and implications. Similarly with hermeneutics as the reading into a text through unpacking, teasing out, (re)intepreting what is explicitly given – ‘there’s more to what you get than what you see, how is this constructed, what is the history of its construction, by whom and for what purpose?’ Foucault’s epigenetic reading of present day power relations in the mental health field and prison system as being made evident through historical review is fundamentally psychodynamic. The psychodynamic tradition has been a major force in revolutionizing western culture’s understanding of personhood. 35
It completed, along with Darwin and Marx, the loosening of the grip of dogmatic religion and authoritarian Victorian social codes on the idea of how one should live ones life.
The psychodynamic tradition, with its evolving understanding and empathy for ordinary humanness( including human frailty, fallibility, ambivalence and limitations) has tended to move western culture away from it’s focus on perfectionistic achievement and control. The psychodynamic tradition is also a critique of western culture’s dominant heroic mode of goal orientation, legalistic morality and conformity as absolute guidelines for living, preferring instead a more emergent, relativistic, relational, empathetic, forgiving, choice and responsibility model. The psychoanalytic idea of the “good enough mother” embodies this theme. Similarly we may see this in the recognition that counter transference (the as yet not worked through parts of a psychotherapist’s psyche) can be accepted and integrated into a professional, competent, therapy relationship through responsible utilization of colleagues and continuing self reflection.
The relativization of linear, moralistic, functional intentionality is also psychodynamic in the same sense. In an empirical, moralistic, linear, functionality based model (such as monotheistic religion, Victorian style liberalism) if I wish to be kinder to my children, I focus on striving for kindness in my behaviour and to exclude unkind thoughts and feelings from my inner experience. In a psychodynamic model, particularly the experiential types, I become kinder by accepting my unkind nature, not as something to be self indulgently, blindly acted upon, but as a condition of my being, a characteristic. I am then required to bear my inner experience of unkindness because the psychodynamics of taking responsibility in fact makes it less likely to be acted out as behaviour and more likely to be contained as experience. In the end, the essential unkindness I will have to deal with will be toward myself.
One of the most difficult things for a goal oriented, positive thinking, forward looking individual to deal with in psychodynamic psychotherapy is this 36 profound relativization of intentionality that is explicit in the psychodynamic method of change. While I consciously intend change and actively work toward it, in order for change to actually happen, I have to accept, and experientially take responsibility for, my deep, complex unconscious resistance to change – a desire, in fact, to not have to change, but rather have the world change instead. This is confounding to our moralistic and legalistic legislative regulatiojn of daily life and to positivistic, issue oriented liberal politics. This dialectic, dynamic revelation from the psychodynamic tradition has not yet been fully integrated into public life.
A major accomplishment of the psychodynamic tradition, beginning with Freud but then spreading to other traditions throughout the 20th century, was the recognition of the sentience of the sexually aggressive child, specifically, initially, by recognition of the persistence of childhood sexual and aggressive impulses in the adult psyche. Through this model, and studies of child development, the developing child has come to be seen as adequate and competent in its capacity for sentient choice making and relational learning. This was originally elaborated through focus on the oedipal period, but has since been extended by self psychology to early infancy, and by Pre and Peri Natal Psychology, primal therapy and Psychohistory through birth back into foetal life. Psychohistory has shown that the late modern western cultural model of child rearing has become one of cooperative service rather than instructive domination. This model extends to the general field of psychotherapy and also to ways of addressing childhood remnants in the adult psyche. This has all been initiated by psychodynamic psychology, originally in the form of psychoanalysis
Another major cultural accomplishment of the psychodynamic tradition has been a revaluing of the feminine aspect of human nature and the concomitant liberation of women and men from stereotyped social roles. The feminist critique of so many aspects of western culture’s inequalities and blindness has a foundation in the psychodynamic tradition and has been particularly elaborated in second wave feminism. This has contributed to, and drawn from, the fields of Critical Theory and postmodernism, and has had profound cultural impact in the 37
20th © in the fields of gender, sexuality studies, cultural studies, politics, education and the general sociopolitical moral and legal regulation of daily life. Julia Kristeva, a feminist and postmodenist psychoanalyst, was given the 2006 Hannah Arendt award for political thought. Simone de Beauvioure, a foundational figure in feminism, was a close confidant of Sartre and a contributor to the popularization of the existential psychodynamic reading of life.