What Is Psychoanalysis?

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Psychoanalysis was at its zenith in the middle of last century.

Since then, the field has been on the outskirts of psychiatry.

Now, a new generation of analysts is joining the profession.

A recent book review in the New York Times magazine of Love’s Labor by Stephen Grosz discussed psychoanalysis almost as much as it discussed the book itself. As is always the case when popular media turns its attention to psychoanalysis, it mentions the field’s “demise” in the 1970s after about 50 years of prominence in psychology, psychiatry, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, literature, cinema, and other genres. It is now nearly a full generation since psychoanalysis occupied a reified sphere of influence in the social zeitgeist. The fall was hard. For years psychoanalysis told the public that mental pathology was the result of internal sexual or aggressive conflicts dating back to early childhood, or the failures of mothers who cursed their children with crippling mental illnesses through their overly cold, or overly enmeshed, mothering. Then in 1952, biological psychiatry swooped in with a pill (a pill!) that seemed to eliminate psychosis. Pills for mania, depression, and........

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