The psychoanalytic model presented on this website varies considerably from other psychoanalytic models. The therapists who belong to Hollywood Psychotherapy have diverse training experiences and may incorporate theories and practices that have emerged from other psychoanalytic schools and movements. Some of those diverse schools of psychoanalysis are listed below. This description of the various schools is excerpted from Barnaby Barratt’s (2013) book, What is psychoanalysis; 100 years after Freud’s “secret committee.”
- There are “classical” practitioners—although what this means is often far from clear, since almost every psychoanalyst claims some sort of adherence to Freud’s multitudinous works.
- There are practitioners whose major theoretical allegiance is to the work of Melanie Klein or Wilfred Bion and their many successors, including the many so-called “neo-Kleinians”—although perhaps it is problematic to group these as if a unitary item.
- Other practitioners orient themselves more to a series of “independent object-relations” theorists, such as Donald Winnicott and numerous others – and again, this corrals theorists as different as Winnicott, Ronald Fairbairn, and Harry Guntrip in a way that is perhaps unfair.
- Some practitioners subscribe tenaciously to the precepts of “ego-psychology,” with its structural-functional depiction of the mind, as first described by contributors such as Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, and David Rapaport.
- There are those whose practice follows the concepts of self-psychology and who admire especially the work of Heinz Kohut.
- Deriving their perspectives both from object-relations and from self psychology, there is also a variegated grouping of interpersonalists, relational psychologists, “intersubjectivists,” and the like—which is not to imply that there are not significantly serious differences within this motley collection.
- There are practitioners who hold that the theories bequeathed by the writings of Jacque Lacan give them an exclusive right to be called Freudians.
- Still more are post-structuralist practitioners, influenced by existentialism, by deconstruction, by feminism, by post-colonial liberationist thinking, and by somatic psychology. Obviously, this too is a heterogenous category.
Barratt, B.B. (2013). What is psychoanalysis? 100 years after Freud’s “secret committee.” New York: Routledge.