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Psychoanalytic theory

 
Wikipedia: Psychoanalytic theory

Psychoanalytic theory refers to the definition and dynamics of personality development which underlie and guide psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy. First laid out by Sigmund Freud, psychoanalytic theory has undergone many refinements since his work (see psychoanalysis).

History [This section is in need of editing]

Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and Jacques Lacan are often treated as canonical thinkers by Lacanian psychoanalysts, although there are considerable objections to their authority, particularly from other psychoanalytical schools and feminism. Precisely in the interest of a theoretical approach to psychoanalysis, Lacan read Freud with G. W. F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Major thinkers within psychoanalytic theory in France include Nicholas Abraham[citation needed], Serge Leclaire[citation needed], Julia Kristeva[citation needed], Slavoj Žižek[citation needed], Jacques Derrida[citation needed], Jean Laplanche[citation needed], René Major[citation needed], Luce Irigaray[citation needed], and Jacques-Alain Miller[citation needed]; their work is anything but unitary — Derrida, for example, has remarked that virtually the entirety of Freud's metapsychology, while possessing some strategic value previously necessary to the elaboration of psychoanalysis, ought to be discarded at this point, whereas Miller is sometimes taken as heir apparent to Lacan because of his editorship of Lacan's seminars, his interest in analysis is even more philosophical than clinical, whereas Major has questioned the complicity of clinical psychoanalysis with various forms of totalitarian government.

Some of the theoretical orientation of psychoanalyss in both German and French and, later, American contexts results in part from its separation from psychiatry and institutionalisation closer to departments of philosophy and literature (or American cultural studies programs). Psychoanalytic theory heavily influenced the work of Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, Louis Althusser, and Cathy Caruth, among others. The implications for these is exemplary in their dispersion; Fanon's interests were in racial and colonial identity, whereas Marcuse and represent distinct Marxist positions that, among other things, attempt to use psychoanalysis in the study of ideology, whereas Caruth, coming from a background in de Manian deconstruction and working in comparative literature, has articulated notions of trauma through literary studies informed by philosophy, psychology, neurology, and Freudian and Lacanian theory. Theory can be so expansive a container as to include the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who believed psychoanalysis ultimately radically reductionist and strongly opposed the psychiatric institutions of their time.

Psychoanalytic theory sometimes heavily informs gender studies and queer theory.

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