Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Humanities, Psychology and Social Sciences
Year: 2024
DOI:
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The Power of The Past: Can Psychoanalytic Theory Do Without Early Childhood Experiences?
Aner Govrin
ABSTRACT:
One of the main tenets of psychoanalytic theory is that a person’s development is determined by often forgotten events in early childhood and that caretakers are significant in shaping personality (Westen, 1998). In recent years, psychanalysts themselves, especially from the relational approach, are trying to minimize the role of childhood in psychoanalytic technique (Chodorow, 1999, Mitchell, 1988, 2000; Wachtel, 2017). The controversy about establishing casual relations between past and present is part of a larger debate within psychoanalysis about the validity and usefulness of etiological hypotheses (Mitchel, 1988). In this lecture, I briefly examine the critique of the relational approach to the importance of the past in psychoanalytic technique through Steven Mitchell (1988) and Paul Wachtel’s (2017). They both stress the importance of the here-and-now interactions between therapist and patient, not as a direct and simplistic one-to-one connection of past experiences, but as a lively ongoing subjective interaction in its own right. Wachtel is even disappointed in relational analysts who are using in a too pervasive manner words like “primitive” “archaic” and “infantile”. I intend to show that psychoanalysis’s perception of the past is far more complex than described by Wachtel and Mitchell. I show that the actual accomplishment of analytic work, still constitute the tying up of past and present whether directly or indirectly, and that if one wants to be called “psychoanalytic,” it is very hard to avoid the causality that exists between childhood and transference.
keywords: relational approach, classical psychoanalysis, memories, repetition compulsion