Article
The American Journal of Psychoanalysis (2007) 67, 260–274. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ajp.3350029
The Power of the Spoken Word in Life, Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis—A Contribution to Interpersonal Psychoanalysis
Strictly speaking there are only two sciences: psychology, pure and applied, and natural science ... For sociology, too, dealing as it does with the behaviour of people in society, cannot be anything but applied psychology. (Freud, 1933).In the analytic treatment there is nothing else but an exchange of words between the analysand and the analyst. (Freud, 1933)
Paper presented at the Clinical Sándor Ferenczi Conference, August 2–6, 2006, Baden-Baden, Germany.
Zvi Lothane1
Correspondence: Zvi Lothane, 1435 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10128; e-mail: schreber@lothane.com
1Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York. Member IPA, APsaA.
Abstract
Starting with a 1890 essay by Freud, the author goes in search of an interpersonal psychology native to Freud's psychoanalytic method and to in psychoanalysis and the interpersonal method in psychiatry. This derives from the basic interpersonal nature of the human situation in the lives of individuals and social groups. Psychiatry, the healing of the soul, and psychotherapy, therapy of the soul, are examined from the perspective of the communication model, based on the essential interpersonal function of language and the spoken word: persons addressing speeches to themselves and to others in relations, between family members, others in society, and the professionals who serve them. The communicational model is also applied in examining psychiatric disorders and psychiatric diagnoses, as well as psychodynamic formulas, which leads to a reformulation of the psychoanalytic therapy as a process. A plea is entered to define psychoanalysis as an interpersonal discipline, in analogy to Sullivan's interpersonal psychiatry.
Keywords:
interpersonal, psychoanalysis, word, language, speech, interpersonal, suggestion
