The Theory of Psychoanalysis: Influential Analysts/Books along the Way ( Part II )

So the next psychoanalyst I met was during my second pastoral position. I began therapy with him in 1987. He reintroduced me to Freud. I began then to read more secondary sources on Freud until my wife visited a used book store and came home with a number of old and original primary sources written by Freud himself. She gave me these books as gifts. They included Ernest Jones's classic 3 Volume Biography of Freud, plus Freud's Introductory Lectures, Three Theories on Sexuality, The Future of an Illusion, and The Interpretation of Dreams. I dove into them with very little background but trying my best to understand. Freud is so easy to read! He was a great writer and his books read like stories. I was also reading pastoral counseling texts that drew heavily on contemporary Freudian psychoanalysis. The main one being Carroll Wise's Pastoral Psychotherapy. Also during this time (1993), I discovered the analysts Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg. Kohut created the analytic theory of Self Psychology and Kernberg is a major contributor to the analytic theory of Object Relations. Now I knew of the three major schools of psychoanalysis. The question was where to put my learning efforts. I decided to try and learn all three!! At this point I was a beginning pastoral psychoanalytic psychotherapist(1995),so I needed practical help in how to actually do psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy with my patients. To get this help I entered supervision to learn the craft while in the midst of doing it. I discovered some new to me, but classical texts on how to conduct psychoanalytic psychotherapy. They were: Psychotherapy: A Dynamic Approach by Paul DeWald, MD, and Psychodynamic Psychiatry by Glen Gabbard, MD. There were several other key texts as well, but since my focus in this blog is on my theory journey I will not list them. My first theory priority was what is called by several different names: Modern Freudian, Contemporary Freudian, Ego Psychology, and Structural theory. These various names refer to Freud's final theory he arrived at in 1923 of Ego, Id, and Superego. It is so well known by so many today. I learned that Freud's 1923 Theory was first articulated by Freud in his now classic book, The Ego and the Id. (I saw his original of this text in Vienna, Austria in Freud's home and office which is now the Freud Museum.) Other texts Freud wrote on this Structural Theory of Ego, Id, and Superego include: Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926), Second Introductory Lectures (1933), An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1939), Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937), Constructions in Psychoanalysis (1937), and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1937). I read them all!! ( Stay tuned, Part III to come.)