ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis, as well as psychotherapy in general, has had a large impact on social thought. But the psychoanalytic movement found a niche under specific cultural conditions. Psychoanalysis has consistently favored nurture over nature in its theories of human development, and these ideas have played out in the way families raise children. As psychoanalysis became more distant from psychiatry, medicine, and academic psychology, it found a new home in the humanities. The “psychologization” of the human condition has also been reflected in psychohistory and psychobiography. This chapter shows how psychoanalytic theory has fitted into the program of post-modernist thought. But the unfortunate tendency of post-modernists to rely on glib but unproven assumptions can only be supported by these trends in humanist thought.
