ABSTRACT
As we encounter psychoanalysis in our education, from the very start, we learn that it is a discipline divided and in constant internal conflict. On one level, by 1950 psychoanalysis was split into several schools of thought that displayed deep animosity toward each other and were unable to collaborate in any substantial way. Probably every major textbook on personality psychology first provides an overview of Freud’s theory and then Jung’s and Adler’s schools that separated from the initial psychoanalytic movement and developed in their own directions (Ellenberger 1970; Ryschlak 1975; see also Makari 2008). The separation of Adler, Stekel, Jung, and other early disciples of Freud resulted in them forming new psychotherapeutical procedures, educational institutes, and even movements that made the refutation of Freud’s theory one of their central goals. At the same time, Freud and the second wave of his disciples tried to prove that, for instance, Jung was a mystic (Bair 2003) or that Ferenczi was psychotic (Bonomi 1999), which resembles political campaigning more than scientific refutation. As time went on, these different schools did not move any closer, and one can even claim that differences are now so big that most members of the various schools of psychotherapy that grew out of The Interpretation of Dreams do not follow the others’ work. Worse still, their languages have become so different that they understand each other less and less.
