Thanks for this piece! I didn't quite understand why Freud was a footnote in one personality class in my undergrad curriculum...the school's quantitative research emphasis means this whole tradition is basically not offered. Thankfully, the library provided great supplemental reading 👏
This is excellent. I know little about it and this is a great intro to the universe, because it sounds like one. There is one point however that could do with further consideration by you. You write regarding CBT:
CBT has been remarkably well-suited to American academia. Unlike psychoanalysis, CBT could be studied quickly. The shortened time frame translated easily into RCTs, inherited from the pharmaceutical industry. The time frame also paved the way for researchers to get tenure: conduct a study, publish, rinse-and-repeat. Those tenured researchers were then the ones to educate graduate students and therapists of the next generation. They became the leaders of the APA and provided information to lawmakers in DC that informed mental health policy.
Yet you don’t discuss or mention all that CBT and other psychodynamic therapies like for example IPT are well suited to the modern person. My understanding is that given cost and the time demand, it’s often not a practical option for a non-pharmaceutical treatment regimen. If there is a means by which psychoanalysis can be a practical alternative, then the APsA and other should get the word out.
This is an excellent piece, Lily. Bravo! As a framework, psychoanalysis is impressively protean and adaptable. CBT assumes a static, "enclosing" view of human experience and distress, and its manualization and rigidity lend themselves naturally to research. I still return to Wampold and Imel's amazing book, "The Great Psychotherapy Debate" (https://www.routledge.com/The-Great-Psychotherapy-Debate-The-Evidence-for-What-Makes-Psychotherapy-Work/Wampold-Imel/p/book/9780805857092), whose robust statistical explorations highlight the importance of practitioner characteristics--which many modern psychoanalysts embody--in assessing the efficacy of psychotherapeutic interventions.
Thanks for writing this important piece. This line you write really stands out: "Many of these misconceptions come from media." Frederick Crews was indeed so instrumental in changing public perception of psychoanalysis, not based so much on fact as on the way he told the story and forcefully compelled people to believe him. It's interesting to note that just two months before Crews' death, Bennet Braun also died. Braun was a psychiatrist and pioneer in dissociation research, but the issue of dissociated and recovered traumatic memory was made into a straw man and Braun is mostly remembered as the guy who "fueled the satanic panic." No surprise, Crews was also instrumental in that narrative. We have a lot to do to catch up the public understanding of psychoanalysis as well as traumatic memory with the scientific research base. Perhaps it's also time to lay Crews' views on recovered memory to rest.
Thanks for this piece! I didn't quite understand why Freud was a footnote in one personality class in my undergrad curriculum...the school's quantitative research emphasis means this whole tradition is basically not offered. Thankfully, the library provided great supplemental reading 👏
This is excellent. I know little about it and this is a great intro to the universe, because it sounds like one. There is one point however that could do with further consideration by you. You write regarding CBT:
CBT has been remarkably well-suited to American academia. Unlike psychoanalysis, CBT could be studied quickly. The shortened time frame translated easily into RCTs, inherited from the pharmaceutical industry. The time frame also paved the way for researchers to get tenure: conduct a study, publish, rinse-and-repeat. Those tenured researchers were then the ones to educate graduate students and therapists of the next generation. They became the leaders of the APA and provided information to lawmakers in DC that informed mental health policy.
Yet you don’t discuss or mention all that CBT and other psychodynamic therapies like for example IPT are well suited to the modern person. My understanding is that given cost and the time demand, it’s often not a practical option for a non-pharmaceutical treatment regimen. If there is a means by which psychoanalysis can be a practical alternative, then the APsA and other should get the word out.
This is an excellent piece, Lily. Bravo! As a framework, psychoanalysis is impressively protean and adaptable. CBT assumes a static, "enclosing" view of human experience and distress, and its manualization and rigidity lend themselves naturally to research. I still return to Wampold and Imel's amazing book, "The Great Psychotherapy Debate" (https://www.routledge.com/The-Great-Psychotherapy-Debate-The-Evidence-for-What-Makes-Psychotherapy-Work/Wampold-Imel/p/book/9780805857092), whose robust statistical explorations highlight the importance of practitioner characteristics--which many modern psychoanalysts embody--in assessing the efficacy of psychotherapeutic interventions.
Thanks for writing this important piece. This line you write really stands out: "Many of these misconceptions come from media." Frederick Crews was indeed so instrumental in changing public perception of psychoanalysis, not based so much on fact as on the way he told the story and forcefully compelled people to believe him. It's interesting to note that just two months before Crews' death, Bennet Braun also died. Braun was a psychiatrist and pioneer in dissociation research, but the issue of dissociated and recovered traumatic memory was made into a straw man and Braun is mostly remembered as the guy who "fueled the satanic panic." No surprise, Crews was also instrumental in that narrative. We have a lot to do to catch up the public understanding of psychoanalysis as well as traumatic memory with the scientific research base. Perhaps it's also time to lay Crews' views on recovered memory to rest.