ABSTRACT
Advocates and critics of psychoanalysis are in agreement concerning one thing — that it is today in a state of decline. Its once powerful position in American psychiatry has been eclipsed by the rise of psychotropic medications, and it increasingly finds it hard to compete with the plethora of psycho therapies, counseling services and alternative medicines. In 1914 Freud wrote:
Extending Freud’s analogy, the contemporary psychoanalytic world is a battle of Lichtenberg knives, each claiming to be the sole representative of the true psychoanalysis. Surveying the academic scene, matters become worse, as psychoa nalysis appears able to take on any form that an author wishes. At every turn, one comes across the assumption that psychoanalysis is an entity that can be considered known and that it has had a huge transformative effect upon Western culture. Both are questionable. It has increasingly emerged that the official history of psychoa nalysis was created through manifold acts of censorship and selective, tendentious rescripting. At the same time, an increasing amount of historical work has been conducted on non-Freudian psychologies and psychotherapies. Aside from any thing else, it has emerged that many of these figures were not the fools and lunatics that Freud, Ernest Jones and other psychoanalysts portrayed them to be. In both of these directions, a watershed was Henri Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970).
