Search

Otto Fenichel in Europe published several papers in which he was advocating a meeting between Marxism and psychoanalysis. Using Marxist concepts, he founded psychoanalysis on rationality and science, and wanted to use psychoanalysis in order to explain the subjective aspects of historical phenomena. On the theoretical level, both Fenichel and Wilhelm Reich were suggesting ideas that had been already proposed by Russian psychologists and psychoanalysts, particularly by Lev S. Vygotskij and especially Alexandr R. Lurija. Fenichel was fearing the influence of irrationalist and anti-Elightenment ideas on psychoanalysis, ideas that persist today. He criticized Melanie Klein, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and ego psychology. When Fenichel moved to the USA, similarly to other émigrés of the same ideological background he was not well accepted by the American psychoanalytic community. While he maintained his cultural interests, in his critical dialogue with ego psychologists and other American colleagues he became known mostly for his clinical and technical contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That conservative and authoritarian psychoanalytic institutions open to innovation in theory and pluralism in the management of power is Arnold Richards' strong commitment. According to the Author, however, substantial innovations are unlikely as long as psychoanalysts linger on embroidering on the Master's thought and struggling in internal feuds, rather than seriously confronting research methods alternative to the clinical one, as well as the results of neighboring disciplines (which have made important progress since Freud's time). With regard to the adhesion to Marxism and Communism of many North American psychoanalysts, the Author shows - working on four topoi that we can see in the background of Richards' paper - how mild is the influence of this adhesion on their conceptions of mental processes; furthermore, the correlation of the same adhesion with the authoritarian practice, once those psychoanalysts reach power, is questionable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]