ABSTRACT

Psychoanalysis in the United States has had its own flavor. On the one hand, with British psychoanalysis in an Anglo-American tradition, it is more empirical, developmental and biologically oriented than French psychoanalysis, which is more philosophical. On the other hand, it has characteristics of its own. Breen (1993), in reviewing contemporary perspectives on femininity and masculinity in those three psychoanalytic cultures, writes that in the United States, the cultural ambiance has been different. Psychoanalysis there has gone in two opposite directions. One is biological, fostered by the fact that psychoanalysis has been a branch of medicine (while in Europe until recently psychoanalysis was largely frowned upon in medical circles). The other is social, encouraged by the vast possibilities for social psychological and developmental studies at the universities, “promoted by the American ideals of social equality and social adjustment, sometimes at the expense of the concept of the unconscious” (Breen, 1993, p. 2).