Basic Psychoanalytic Concepts: I. The Extension of Clinical Concepts Outside the Psychoanalytic Situation

Abstract

This paper aims at introducing a series of articles on basic psychoanalytic concepts. Many concepts which have developed within psychoanalysis have been extended for use within other frames of reference and in very different settings. If psychoanalytic concepts have validity such extension should be possible and useful, but it seems inevitable that in the process of extension changes in their meaning will occur, and it is one of the purposes of this series of papers to examine a number of concepts from this point of view. The philosophical implications of change of meaning when concepts are transferred from their original context has recently been discussed by a number of writers, e.g. Kaplan (1964) and Schon (1963). In this connection psychoanalytic theory presents special problems of its own. It is often regarded as being a completely integrated and consistent system of thought, but this is far from being the case. Psychoanalytic concepts are not all well defined, and changes in their meaning have occurred as psychoanalysis has developed and its theories have changed. We hope to show some of these changes in the papers which follow. Further, the same term has been used with different meanings even at the same point in the development of psychoanalysis. A prime example of this is the multiple meaning of the term ego (Hartmann, 1956), or of terms such as identification and introjection (Sandier, 1960). We find a situation existing within psychoanalysis at the present time in which the meaning of a concept is often only fully discernible from an examination of the context in which it is used. The situation is complicated still further by the fact that different schools of psychodynamic thought have inherited (and then modified for their own use) much of the same basic terminology.