Who are the Freudians?

To answer this question, I began in the late 1970s to undertake a cross-cultural study of psychoanalysis. I had been aware that neither celebrations nor condemnations, neither revisions nor distortions of Freud's and his disciples' insights had attempted to assess the profusion of clinical studies and theories in relation to their local, taken-for-granted cultural assumptions. By then, I already had written a chapter on the French psychoanalyst Jacques, Lacan in my book, The Age of Structuralism: Levi-Strauss to Foucault (1980), and had noted that some Parisian psychoanalysts (and not only Lacanians) were elaborating on the early Freudians' discoveries in entirely different directions than were, for instance, the members of the New York Psychoanalytic Society or of the Sigmund Freud-Institut in Frankfurt. At the time, however, I was not yet fully aware that psychoanalysis had so many offshoots, and offshoots of offshoots.

Although I expanded on, and demonstrated, that my previous observations of cultural differences were major elements in the role that psychoanalysis was being accorded within various societies, I still underestimated the personal preferences and affinities among analysts and proponents who are purported to share a specific theory, a culture, and who either belong to the International Psychoanalytic Association or attend its meetings. The very profusion of theories and practices led me, reluctantly, to limit my book to the so-called classical Freudians alone.

As a result of that research, I maintained that "the fragmentation of psychoanalytic theory proves, among other things, that the Freudians primarily are united by their profession rather than by their ideas." And I predicted that even a victory in court by American psychologists, who in 1985 were suing for membership in the American Psychoanalytic Association (APA) and in the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), might not bring the equality of prestige and income they expected, and did not bode well for future cooperation among Freudian therapists. Still, there now are many local attempts to present a united front, but it is not clear that this has put an end to earlier rivalries.

Since The Freudians. A Comparative Perspective was published, in 1989, there have been significant changes not only in the make-up of the psychoanalysts' professional organizations, but in specific culturally induced attitudes towards Freud and psychoanalysis, and in the transliteration of...