Dear Friend (Name not mentioned for privacy)

It is good to hear from you. I ment to the members part of the list. There were very few comments. I was  unable to get to any of your published comments on the list or any other place. In fact I haven't come across any of your published opinions. I wonder if there is another list that I am not a member of. No Lance, I meant it. The human subject had changed like everything else in life and it was changed to a great extent by the influence of the psychoanalytic culture itself.

  

I noticed two comments that were negative (childish: like being accused of being a secret communist agent who is to destroy USA psychoanalysis). I decided to go back to my blog where I get feedback from several countries... not all positive but all from psychoanalysts who link to what I publish, not take them as pro or against the APaA or the IPA. 

 

I knew that using 'useless 'will not sit well with people who are making a living of practicing that same psychoanalysis. It is impossible that analysts in the USA- who are less than 4 thousands- are not aware that all the efforts made to at least keep psychoanalysis viable did not bring any results to show that they have found the right way to revive it (??? you are the most dedicated and honest person who is concerned about that situation). I am convinced (I have the right to have convictions) that  the old 'justified' narcissism analysts enjoyed for decades is still controlling our self-perception.  But now we have nothing to nourish our narcissism to being psychoanalysts. There are reasons but no justification to not like our true image. Just compare how we handled our disagreement in the last four decades and the splits in England and France. 

 

I will take your objection to something I said as a step toward explaining my changed position from the list and my blog. You quote me saying: "Parents are more informed about childhood and its psychological conflicts'', I have no doubt the Oedipus Complex is not a common term anywhere in the world. The parents of any education and cultural background are now aware that their relationships with children in childhood have consequences (I come from Egypt that is  backward because of the educational system and the prevalence of Islamic thinking in it. I saw mothers who can hardly read and write making remarkable observations about bringing up kids intelligently, which my mother and aunts  had no clue about .

My position lately is that we have a poor version of the old classical psychoanalysis because of the haphazard additions and discarding of main ideas about the human subject left us with a seriously disfigured psychoanalysis. Society and the human subjects have changed in a drastic ways lately, with the availability of the internet worldwide.. All we psychoanalysts are concerned about is training and  the number of candidates and patients seeking psychoanalysis. Those concerns are 'results' of poor psychoanalysis and dealing with them is cosmetic. .

The birth of psychoanalysis came with the birth of new and modern subjects (males and females) who invited exploring their unspoken psychological conflicts. In other and better ways: psychoanalysis was the response to a change in the human subject that needed a new approach to continue the March Of The Race. Change is inevitable and after over a hundred years we would be just protecting our narcissism to think that the psychoanalysis of a hundred or forty years ago is still valid till now.

 

From the reactions I got from the membership I easily could say: not only patients have changed as a natural result of time, but analysts are still maintaining  an old narcissistic self concept. The old psychoanalysis WAS excellent but a new one has to be discovere to deal with new kinds of psychopathology. Calling for a new psychoanalysis does not consider the old one as useless, Just that it lived its life  we should move on to know who we are now: Oedipus or Narcissus (Thank you Jane).