Word: freudian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Freedom to or for what? In the opinion of Viennese Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, a man's "will to meaning" is more basic than the Freudian will to pleasure. To ignore his concern with value is to fail to do justice to "the humanness of man." As Freudian analysis aims to liberate the mature sexual and aggressive drives, so Frankl's treatment (called logotherapy) seeks to free man's spiritual unconscious so that he can realize his innate need to find meaning in life...
...method of treating emotional disturbance called psychosynthesis also assumes the reality and the importance-for a few men, at least-of their spiritual side. Assagioli, the Freudian-trained psychoanalyst who originated the method, explains that "we walk to the door of religion, but we let the individual open it." Assagioli's theory postulates several levels of man's "inner constitution," including a higher realm that is the psychic home of his spiritual, philosophical and artistic "imperatives." To gain access to this region, Assagioli uses conventional psychoanalysis as well as a series of esoteric exercises and meditation techniques...
...FREUDIAN PSYCHOLOGY, as a liberal theory, sees people as creatures with infinite wants. Left to their own devices, divorced from the control of society, they would kill, rape, and steal to satisfy their (primarily sexual) desires. But one day, all these violent people realized that the uninhibited pursuit of their aims would eventually result in devastating war. So, giving up their rights to plunder, they created a society both to protect themselves from their own worst impulses and, in he long-run, to help people--as individuals--to satisfy their desires more safely...
...task of the liberal psychotherapist proceeds logically from this view of people. The therapist must deal with those humans who cannot restrain the characteristic primitive urges of the species. He must reconstruct the individual's defenses, enabling the Freudian neurotic to hold back the tide of violence which lurks behind people's social veneer...
Steiner sees most of the provocative new ideas in Britain as coming from the Continent. "The intellectual traffic over here is tremendous, particularly French Marxism and French structuralism. Psychoanalysis, which has ground to a halt everywhere else, is being given a transfusion of radical sociology in France in psychopolitics: Freudian categories are being applied to the problems of labor, industry and the middle class. Bored with pragmatism and objectivity, the young of Europe are generally moving into an age of myth and irrationality...