By Harvard Health Publishing — 2006
Sigmund Freud's ideas about treating the troubled mind continue to influence our thinking about human behavior.
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Aside from being one of the most important proponents of psychoanalysis during the 20th century, Franz Alexander helped lay the foundations for psychosomatic medicine.
Alexander was a rare psychoanalytic pioneer who, despite a thorough grounding in classical Freudian theory, had the courage, vision, and flexibility to modify his thinking in the light of newer knowledge.
Franz Gabriel Alexander has been described on more than one occasion as the father of psychosomatic medicine. For almost 25 years, he was director of the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis, where he trained many of the leading students of emotional disturbances and psychosomatic diseases.
The emerging field of “neuropsychoanalysis” aims to combine two fundamentally different areas of study—psychoanalysis and neuroscience—for a whole new way of understanding how the mind works.
He's been debunked again and again—and yet we still can't give him up.
Psychoanalysis has fallen on hard times. Freud’s gender theories are trashed for their sexism, and his original instinct theories are regarded skeptically.
To a believer in the impossible profession, the family memoirs of famous psychoanalysts constitute a troubling but delicious genre. There is a certain satisfaction in reading about the unhappy marriages and not good enough parenting skills of bad Freudian fathers.
Psychoanalysis is a form of psychotherapy based on understanding the unconscious mental processes that determine a person’s thoughts, actions, and feelings.
After years of investigations, deriving from research and clinical work of the last century, the discovery of neural networks, together with the free energy principle, we are observing under a new light psychodynamic neuroscience in its exploration of the mind-brain system.
There is no question that psychoanalysis—both as a therapeutic approach and theoretical outlook—has left its mark on psychology.