Freud does not constitute the alpha and omega of psychoanalysis, just one of its more conservative currents. For more forward looking work, look to Otto Fenichel, Thomas Szasz, Reich, Laing, etc.
Joanna
Mike Ballard wrote:
Psychoanalysis has changed its function in the culture of our time, in accordance with fundamental social changes that occurred during the first half of the century. The collapse of the liberal era and of its promises, the spreading totalitarian trend and the efforts to counteract this trend, are reflected in the position of psychoanalysis. During the twenty years of its development prior to the First World War, psychoanalysis elaborated the concepts for the psychological critique of the most highly praised achievement of the modem era: the individual. Freud demonstrated that constraint, repression, and renunciation are the stuff from which the free personality is made; he recognized the general unhappiness of society as the unsurpassable limit of cure and normality. Psychoanalysis was a radically critical theory. Later, when Central and Eastern Europe were in revolutionary upheaval, it became clear to what extent psychoanalysis was still committed to the society whose secrets it revealed. The psychoanalytic conception of man, with its belief in the basic unchangeability of human nature, appeared as reactionary; Freudian theory seemed to imply that the humanitarian ideals of socialism were humanly unattainable. Then the revisions of psychoanalysis began to gain momentum.
Eros and Civilization. Herbert Marcuse 1955
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/eros-civilisation/epilogue.htm
===== **************************************************************** Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.
Norman Mailer
http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal
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