New Models and Psychoanalytic Theory

Abstract

Received: June 02, 2014 | Published: June 03, 2014 It was nineteen twenty three when Freud published his second major theory about the mind, the structural theory, a tripartite model that divided the mind into Ego, Id and Superego. During the same decade many leading quantum physicists were publishing some of their bewildering findings. Concurrently the great mathematician/ philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, began integrating some of these findings into his process philosophy. For psychoanalysis, however, Newtonian physics the accepted model of the time – became normative. Its major tenets, i.e. a strict separation between the observer and the observed (avoiding subjective influence) the replication of findings by other neutral observers and the reliance on strict cause and effect were paramount. Psychoanalysis assumed such models were normative despite its experience of what Freud named the unconscious – an area of psychic experience that shows remarkable parallels with some of the basic findings of quantum mechanics.