Psychological-mindedness (the propensity to take responsibility for one’s problems and to look within oneself for the solutions) is considered by many to be an important criterion for analyzability. Historically, these criteria have operated to exclude many who might otherwise have seemed to be potential beneficiaries of psychoanalytic treatment. I... See more

Geertz (1973) argues that the Enlightenment view of human nature placed such an overbearing emphasis on universal characteristics that it relegated the differential effects of culture to secondary status.

A traditional ego-psychology analysis typically focuses on analyzing the patient’s inner life as the main source of problems. In contrast, a relational analyst emphasizes not only the patient’s inner life, but also the mutual relational dynamics of the therapeutic interaction in the session.

Historically, however, psychoanalysis emerged in a specifically Western tradition of intellectual and social values. It is based on a philosophy of liberal individualism and thus has proved to be a therapeutic technique exhibiting constraints that have limited its applicability across cultures and classes.

We must also include in our clinical theories the psychological misery occasioned by actual and often ongoing experiences of social oppression. In part, such socialized misery may be internalized and perpetuated by an individual’s use of mechanisms such as identification with the aggressor, dissociation, denial, and projective identification, which... See more

To survive, any society requires moral legitimization. The philosophy of liberal individualism serves to legitimize capitalism because it espouses ideals that suggest that all human rights and needs are respected under its terms. If it were generally recognized that capitalism is a system of dominance and exploitation that requires the enrichment o... See more

Relational psychoanalytic models, sometimes referred to as intersubjective, do not view individuals as discrete centers of experience and action; instead, they assert that all self-experience is ontologically social. They challenge the “myth of the isolated mind” (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992, p. 7) and suggest that psychological experience is derived... See more

We can no longer operate on the assumption that the Western capitalist culture of self-contained individualism is superior to all other cultural forms and continue to encode those values in the practice of psychoanalysis.

Peter Kropotkin spend 5 years observing animals in the wilds of Siberia, and having read Darwin, sought to replicate his opersations of the competitive struggle of species in the wild.