A scientific school in psychoanalysis: selected fact or overvalued idea?

Modern psychoanalytic schools

Abstract

In this paper I would like to investigate the meaning of such phenomena as ‘a scientific school’ in psychoanalytic thinking and training. I suppose an influence of school could be either positive or negative – in the first case we might say on it as a kind of "conceptual container", helping us to provide an analytical "alfa-function", i.e. to think about clinical experience with a patient and to receive a new knowledge about human mind; in the second case we face with the different kind of scholar theories "fetishizing", their transformation into overvalued ideologies, which searches for new confirmations of their own truthfulness and omnipotence. My thinking is rooted in my own experience of "scholar training" in the program of Ukrainian Kleinian Seminars Program, supported by Melanie Klein Trust, which took place during last 17 years (Garvey). On the other hand, I will try to consider the contemporary discussions on the issue of comparison and dialogue of different psychoanalytical schools. In the last part of the paper I will describe some "critical" and "clinical" examples, which could illustrate the typical positive and negative aspects of "school attitude" in psychoanalytical discussions and practice.