Subjectivity and language(2nd part). Changes of paradigms in the discours of psychotherapy

Abstract

In this second volume of the work, an attempt is made to provide a foundation for psychotherapy, and to investigate the possibility as well as the conditions of a psychotherapeutic discours. This calls for a review of the development of concepts, definition of objective, as well as cognitive aims of psychoanalysis and the various therapeutic approaches that have evolved from it. At the center of Freud’s theory lies the definition of disturbance as a conflict between human nature and the demands of culture, the concept of mediation between physical and social determination. Freud’s biologistic concepts, born of the thinking of his period, which was predominantly shaped by thought in the natural sciences, have since been modified and expanded as required by more recent paradigms, such as attempted in the theory of object-relationships, in the representation of a linguistically structured unconscious by J. Lacan, or in the concept of interaction patterns by A. Lorenzer. In this, a decisive role is assigned to symbolic, and, in particular, verbal and linguistic mediation - not only as the foundation and prerequisite of all cognition, but also as an essential element of social interaction, and thus of culturally determined patterns of thought and action, as well as serving as a structural principle of the unconscious.

Keywords:
Psychoanalysis, metapsychology, ego-psychology, self-psychology, theory of object-relationship, interaction-patterns