Analytic literature seems to have a major philosophical side to it, Freud has often been hailed as a revolutionary philosopher…
What is the philosopher’s opinion of psychodynamic/psychoanalytic therapy today?
Focusing on the concepts of “ego” and “Id” (by the way, Freud never used these terms himself, he used the pronouns “I” and “it”, respectively; the english translator for Freud’s work, James Stachy, changed the them to ego and id in an attempt to make it sound more scienfitic), and the idea of the unconscious, I agree.
This all boils down to an attempt to remove the “neurotic” behaviors from individual’s who experience extreme states of cognitive dissonance (holding two conflicts thoughts/attitudes at once).
The original thought, which is a desire or behvaior that the individual would naturally perform while at ease (whether the impulse is morally wrong, requiring work to remove that “unnatural” impulse, or an actual trait or characteristic the person cannot prevent (such as intelligence or body height), is the “Id”, the “it”–the behavior that their superego (their moral or ethical considerations, which is mostly made up of the beliefs of society and culture, but can be constructed themselves, if they are creative nd intelligent enough to come to their own insights) tells them they cannot do.
So the neurotic individual becomes tense in certain situations. They feel a desire to perform the actions that attempt to naturally surface, but at the same time their will is telling them not to.
In order to more comfortably live with himself, the individual has distanced himself from this “Id”/“It” behavior. He finds a way to seperate himself from the "them"s that take part of those actions.
So when the individual wants to “act out” but gets nervous and irritated at the idea of performing that behavior, believing it is wrong, they think negatively about that behavior, without considering the thought refers to them (which they’ve trained themselves to not even consider).
They then look at other people, and see the behaviors in them (yes, the people may truly exhibit the behavior, to varying degrees, but the neurotic person zeros in on the specific behavior, ignoring what cant be linked to it).
Psychodynamic theory is an attempt to reverse this faulty ego-protection system–this process which simply resaults in further irritation, not growth.
The individual has to understand that the “Id” is coming from them, not others.
Once the patient understands this, he can either train himself to overcome this behavior (if it’s behavior the patient (and/or therapist) consider a negtive that needs to be overcomed) or change his superego thoughts.
At this point, I think other therapies work best.
I think of psychodynamic therapy as replacing a fault parts on a computer, and cognitive/emotional, behavioral, humanistic etc theories as downloading updates, system protection, and other software to prevent damage, while also adding a new desktop images, choosing font types, colors, etc.