ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis is arguably the single most important intellectual development of the twentieth century. Psychoanalysis shares a boundary with literature, a boundary with psychiatry and medicine and a third boundary with academic psychology. These three boundaries define the concerns and methods that are uniquely psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis shares a second boundary with psychiatry and medicine, the attempt within the medical traditions of the West to heal what the nineteenth-century Romantic psychiatrists called the sickness of the soul. Psychoanalysis shares a third boundary with academic psychology. The intellectual traditions are similar. The three boundaries fluctuate in the intensity with which they are guarded. On the boundary between psychoanalysis and psychiatry and medicine there are increasing hostilities. Border disputes between psychoanalysis and its neighbouring disciplines tend to be characterized by a lack of engagement with substantive issues in favour of playing on prejudice and received ideas about scientific work.
