Biomedical subjects

R S Wallerstein

Publications and source records attributed to R S Wallerstein.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

PubMed1989

The future of psychoanalysis.

We have tried, in a necessarily kaleidoscopic and highly condensed manner, to highlight our perspectives on the foreseeable future of psychoanalysis, along a number of interrelated but clearly distinct dimensions. Our discussion has dealt with the nature of our field as a science and also as a discipline, the nature of the training for it, the nature of its research, and the nature and scope of its professional practice. In all of these areas, matters seem both more complex and less clear-cut than they were in the immediate post-World War II period when we entered the field, which is now forty years ago in the approximately one-hundred-year-old history of psychoanalysis. We did not discuss in any detail the International Psychoanalytical Association or the American, its component through which we have our international membership. We have, however, via the IPA Newsletter, given voice to the organizational struggles of the International: the April 1989 issue of the Newsletter carries our account of the organizational changes within the IPA during the last four years and what we think they mean in relation to some of the issues discussed in this article. The fuller story of how our changing psychoanalytic life and identities are reflected in our institutional structures, as well as a more detailed specification of the future directions we have tried to chart in our inquiry, all deserve separate extended treatment and more complete justification.

Forecasting↗

PubMed1988

Psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic science, and psychoanalytic research--1986.

The present standing of psychoanalysis as a science and the vitality of psychoanalytic research effort are reviewed. The two are interdependent, since the possibilities for empirical research rest on the necessary assumption that psychoanalysis is indeed enough a science to be susceptible to knowledge advance by the (research) methods of science. Concerning our status as a science, I review attacks on our scientific credentials (both from within our ranks and without) by the logical positivists, by the hermeneuticists (a rubric comprising a variety of hermeneutic, phenomenological, exclusively subjectivistic, and/or linguistically based conceptualizations of our field), and the most recent by the philosopher of science, Adolf Grünbaum. I try to demonstrate what I feel to be the failure of each of these assaults, and why I feel there is no reason to see psychoanalysis as anything other than a scientific psychology and, therefore, in theory amenable to empirical research approaches. I then review the history and the current status of these systematic research efforts in psychoanalysis, and the reasons why these have been far less in scope and in accomplishment than has been possible or than has been needed. Here I have focused especially on research involving technique and our theory of change and cure--i.e., research on the analytic process; on what changes take place (outcome) and how those changes come about or are brought about (process).

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed1988

One psychoanalysis or many?

This paper describes the historic development of psychoanalysis, the singular product of the genius of one man, Sigmund Freud, and which he made such strenuous efforts through his lifetime to maintain as a unified enterprise, defining out dissidents (like Adler, Jung, etc.), into what has become in the almost half-century since his death a science and a discipline characterized by an increasing diversity or pluralism, of theoretical perspectives, of linguistic and thought conventions, and of distinctive regional, cultural, and language emphases. I discuss both the understanding of this theoretical diversity and what, in the face of it, holds us together as common adherents of a shared psychoanalytic science and profession. My thesis is that what unites us is our shared focus on the clinical interactions in our consulting rooms, the phenomena encompassed by the 'present unconscious' (the Sandlers) or the 'clinical theory' (George Klein). When we look beyond that to an explanatory structure within which to conceptualize the genetic-developmental process, normal and abnormal mental functioning, psychopathology and its reversal (cure) i.e. the realm of the 'past unconscious' or the 'general theory', we posit our various theoretical, linguistic or thought perspectives, i.e.--at this stage of our historical development--our metaphors or our various explanatory symbolisms. Some implications of this viewing of our various theoretical perspectives in psychoanalysis (ego psychological, object-relational, self-psychological, Kleinian, Bionian, Lacanian, etc.) as but metaphoric expressions, are reviewed.

Austria↗

PubMed1986

Psychoanalysis as a science: a response to the new challenges.

Few theoretical issues in psychoanalysis have been more constantly argued than the status of our discipline as a science. For long the attack has been from the logical positivists and the extensions of their argument by Karl Popper. Over recent decades the debate about the place of our metapsychology has intensified the concerns about our scientific status. In this paper I respond briefly to the logical positivist, the Popperian, and the information-processing systems theory arguments and then develop at greater length a response to the two current, most widespread philosophy-of-science assaults upon our credibility as science, that of the hermeneuticists (Ricoeur, Habermas, Gadamer, and others), and the newest, that of the philosopher, Adolf Grünbaum.

Humans↗

PubMed1985