Toward a New Paradigm

Grounded in a 19th century worldview, psychoanalysis developed from within a paradigm of biology, medicine, and the natural sciences. In the United States, evolutionary biology provided an organized method of thinking about people, while constructing psychoanalytic theories. American psychoanalysis in particular is wedded to notions of sequential stage theories and developmental paradigms in which a progressive and hierarchical development of mental functions is determined by the development and hierarchical arrangement of the central nervous system. Disruptions during particular phases of development in childhood have deleterious effects on particular systems of motives, character traits, object relations, and ego or self-structures. Infused with a medical ideology, thinking and behaviors falling outside of an empirically established normative are understood as symptomatic of underlying psychopathology; the causal factors are understood in much the same way as those of biology.