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It is especially the case in psychiatry that the continuous encounter between the thinking of the natural scientist and that of the philosopher is very productive and exciting. —Martin Heidegger (Zollikon Seminars) Everyone agrees that the field of psychoanalysis is undergoing widespread dispersion and dilution these days, with many conflicting schools of thought and many new opinions. In order to maintain our sense of identity as psychoanalysts , we need to have a clear notion of what we regard to be psychoanalysis and what it stands for. As a contribution to the resolution of this critical problem and to address the issue of what the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry (the organization to which I loyally belong), represents , and also to warn of the dangers to our professional future, I will first discuss the decline and closing of the most famous Academy of all time, that of Plato, and review historically how and why Plato’s academy disintegrated. Historians agree this disintegration represented a failure of nerve in the thinkers of the time as a consequence of their efforts to fit into the prevailing Christian cultural milieu. Christianity as a secular power was increasingly replacing that of classical Greece and its derivative, the Roman Empire. The goal of Plato’s academy members shifted from the disinterested pursuit of truth to one of accommodation to the new prevailing powers. I suggest that a similar failure of nerve is taking place today. As Foucault (1973a, 1973b) pointed out, the nature and structure of the human sciences or “disciplines” in a given era are generated by the prevailing political and economic powers of that particular era. 157 9 The Contemporary Failure of Nerve and the Crisis of Psychoanalysis I will go on to describe once more what I think is fundamental to the practice and theory of psychoanalysis and present a clinical example of a typical type of patient that we are dealing with today. Although such patients seem to stand sharply in contrast to the traditional hysterical patients of Freud, they still can be understood and treated using his methodology . In fact an argument could be made that some of Freud’s patients showed evidence of being what today would be diagnosed as a borderline personality disorder. I will follow this by a discussion of the mind-brain problem in the philosophy of science, which indicates there is an unjustified optimism in the current trend towards “neuropsychoanalysis” and in its basic assumption, a mereological fallacy, that if we know all about the workings of the brain it will completely explain the workings of the mind. Actually, there are many philosophers who disagree with this assumption and point out that even if we knew everything about the workings of the brain, it would not eliminate our need for a science of mind, the best of which is the practice and theory of Freud’s psychoanalysis. Because we are in the era of the popularity and reputed progress of brain studies, there is a tendency to forget that psychoanalysis, as pointed out in chapter 1, is a unique discipline combining natural science observations of the transference with hermeneutics and energetics (Ricoeur 1970). Being unique, it is not replaceable or reducible to any knowledge of a materialistic substrate. I will conclude by outlining what I believe should be our basic ideals as psychoanalysts , the glue that should hold the profession together. I hope to convince the reader that the founder of our discipline, Sigmund Freud, offered a towering edifice that still in its basics can form the foundation of modern psychoanalytic theory and practice, even though I agree with the current tendency to de-idealize Freud, the person. CLASSICAL GREEK THOUGHT For Pythagoras, in about 550 BC mathematics was the key to the order and the beauty of the universe. The intellectual satisfaction of mathematics leads us, as Plato subsequently said, to the realm of the perfect; it is, he thought, a way of truth, a way to recognize the real objects of the world, a way to approach the Form of the Good. Similarly, Aristotle believed that a life of theoria, pure inquiry, was the best life. Everything from that time on went down hill. For example, the sophist Antiphon said that the whole of life is wonderfully open to complaint; it has nothing remarkable, great, or noble, but all is petty, feeble, brief, and mingled with sorrows. But Plato believed that reason was for the purpose of enabling 158 The Future of...

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