24 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
British psychoanalyst and prolific essayist who writes about psychoanalysis, desire, literature, and the good life in a style that blends clinical insight with literary essay — whose books include On Kissing Tickling and Being Bored, Missing Out, and On Balance.
Greek-French philosopher and psychoanalyst who argued that society is constituted by a radical social imaginary — a creative capacity for instituting new meanings — and developed a philosophy of radical autonomy.
British pediatrician and psychoanalyst who developed object relations theory — introducing the concepts of the transitional object (a child's blanket or stuffed animal), the good-enough mother, and the true vs. false self — making him the most practical and humane of the post-Freudian psychoanalysts.
British pediatrician and psychoanalyst who developed the object relations theory of early development — introducing the concepts of the transitional object, the good-enough mother, and the holding environment.
American psychoanalyst and author whose Being There argues that maternal presence in the first three years of life is the single most important factor in child emotional development — advocating for extended maternity leave and against early daycare based on neuroscience and attachment theory.
Welsh psychoanalyst who was Freud's official biographer — writing the three-volume Sigmund Freud: Life and Work — and who founded the British Psychoanalytical Society and the International Psychoanalytic Association, making him the most politically powerful figure in institutionalizing psychoanalysis.
French psychoanalyst and militant who collaborated with Gilles Deleuze to develop schizoanalysis as an alternative to Lacanian psychoanalysis and to theorize desire as productive rather than structured by lack.
Professional and scientific organization founded by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in 1910 to unify and govern the international psychoanalytic movement.
French psychoanalyst who 'returned to Freud' by reinterpreting psychoanalysis through structural linguistics — arguing that the unconscious is structured like a language, that desire is the desire of the Other, and that the subject is constituted by its entry into language (the symbolic order).
German psychoanalyst who founded the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society and made key contributions to the theory of character — extending Freud's psychosexual theory to the anal and oral character types — and who analyzed Melanie Klein, Karen Horney, and Helene Deutsch.
German-Russian writer and psychoanalyst who was one of the most remarkable intellectual women of the late 19th and early 20th century — famously refusing Nietzsche's marriage proposal, inspiring Rilke's greatest poetry, writing one of the first books on Nietzsche, and becoming one of Freud's closest associates.
Swiss psychiatrist who founded Daseinsanalysis by translating Heidegger's existential phenomenology into a clinical framework for understanding mental illness as distortions of being-in-the-world.
Austrian psychoanalyst and Freud's closest associate for 20 years who broke with Freud over the centrality of the birth trauma, developing a will-based psychology that emphasized creativity, individuation, and the heroic self-creation of identity.
British philosopher who wrote Art and Its Objects and Painting as an Art — developing the theory of 'seeing-in' (the experience of seeing a depicted object in a painted surface) and integrating psychoanalytic theory with philosophy of mind and aesthetics.
Russian-Jewish psychiatrist who was Jung's patient at the Burghölzli, became his student and briefly his lover, then trained with Freud and became a psychoanalyst herself — contributing the concept of the death drive (Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens) before Freud published it — and was murdered by the Nazis in 1942.
Hungarian psychoanalyst who was Freud's most creative clinical disciple and the analyst of John Rickman, who analyzed Wilfred Bion — developing mutual analysis, the theory of confusion of tongues between adults and children, and the emphasis on genuine empathic presence as the basis of therapeutic action.
Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis — the theory and practice based on the unconscious mind, repression, infantile sexuality, and the talking cure.
Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic who synthesizes Hegel, Lacan, and Marx to analyze ideology, popular culture, and politics — the most widely read continental philosopher of his generation — known for finding Hegelian dialectics in Hollywood films and Lacanian desire in political events.
The original Wednesday Psychological Society (later Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society) founded by Freud in 1902, the first institutional home of psychoanalysis and the training ground for its founding generation.
Austrian psychiatrist who was a pioneering figure in character analysis and body-oriented psychotherapy before becoming increasingly eccentric and developing the pseudoscientific orgone energy theory.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between patient and analyst. His theories of the unconscious, repression, and the Oedipus complex transformed Western thought about the mind.
Parapraxis theory belongs to the early 20th-century moment when psychoanalytic thought began to illuminate the unconscious mechanisms behind everyday mistakes and slips of the tongue, embodying the problem of unconscious motivation.
A foundational work in psychoanalysis that explores the psychological mechanisms behind everyday mistakes and slips, situating Freud's thought in the early 20th-century intellectual landscape.
Herbert Marcuse's synthesis of Freud and Marx — arguing that civilization's repression of Eros (sexuality/pleasure) serves the interests of capitalism, and that sexual liberation is essential to genuine political liberation.