Psychoanalysis, the Anxiety of Influence, and the Sadomasochism of Everyday Life

Abstract

After reviewing recent upheavals within psychoanalytic institutions and our diminished status in the worlds of academia, psychiatry, and the media, this essay turns to the historical trends that led to the current state of siege in which psychoanalysis finds itself—trends most clearly manifested on the East Coast institutes of the United States. I hypothesize that a legacy of arrogant entitlement on the part of the founding fathers made for an abiding institutional authoritarianism. This hierarchicalism fostered a loss of self-determination and individuation, negative Oedipal submission, identifications with the aggressor within psychoanalytic organizations, and a pseudospeciation with regard to potential critics in the outside world. Promising in many respects, nonetheless many of the current changes in psychoanalytic education and theory inevitably represent a positive Oedipal rebellion against the generation that had oppressed the one now in ascendancy and, more insidiously, a means of containing the candidates now in our charge. Finally, I argue that our future depends on our ability to embrace unwanted and disavowed truths about the history of our field and thereby to reclaim both our idealism and our credibility.