Psychoanalysis begins with a fundamental insight: the unconscious dimensions of emotional life profoundly shape human experience. The beliefs and anxieties that govern our perception and conduct remain largely opaque to us, having calcified into automatic patterns through years of repetition. This opacity necessitates a particular method of investigation—the dialogic encounter of the clinical setting.
Our unconscious conflicts manifest in recognizable forms: we find ourselves enacting self-defeating patterns, imprisoned within unsatisfying relationships, unable to realize our emotional, creative, or professional capacities. The clinical space provides a unique arena where these patterns inevitably resurface, enabling the analyst to discern and articulate the underlying psychic structures that generate such repetitions.
Through this process of collaborative exploration, psychoanalysis offers more than symptomatic relief. By bringing unconscious material into conscious awareness, it creates the conditions for genuine transformation—reducing psychological suffering while expanding our capacity for satisfaction and meaning.
1870s–1890s – Paris, Nancy, and the “unconscious” before Freud
Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière uses hypnosis to study hysteria, giving it neurological prestige.
At Nancy, Hippolyte Bernheim and Ambroise Liébeault emphasize suggestion and the social/relational dimension of hypnosis.
Pierre Janet develops notions of subconscious fixed ideas and dissociation; later he and Freud will fight over priority for the unconscious.(Histories of Psychoanalysis)
1880–1895 – Breuer and Freud
1880–82: Josef Breuer treats “Anna O.” (Bertha Pappenheim) with cathartic hypnosis – later mythologized as the first psychoanalytic cure.(Pacja)
1885–86: Freud studies with Charcot in Paris; 1886 he brings hypnosis back to Vienna.(Wikipedia)
1895: Studies on Hysteria (Breuer & Freud) introduces the talking cure, symptom as compromise-formation, and the idea that narrativizing trauma relieves symptoms.(Pacja)
1900–1905 – Core Freudian theses crystallize
The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) theorize unconscious conflict, wish-fulfilment, and parapraxes.
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) radicalizes infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex – a key source of later splits.(Wikipedia)
1902 – Vienna Wednesday Psychological Society
Freud convenes weekly meetings at Berggasse 19: Adler, Rank, Stekel, Reitler, later Ferenczi, Abraham, Eitingon, Jones, Sachs form the core network of the movement.(Freud Museum London)
1908–1910 – Internationalization & IPA
1908 Salzburg congress: Freud’s followers from Zurich (Jung, Bleuler), Budapest (Ferenczi), Berlin (Abraham), London (Jones) meet.(University College London)
1910: The International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) is founded, formally organizing the movement and creating a transnational structure.(Wikipedia)
1909 – Clark University
Freud, Jung, and Ferenczi lecture in Worcester, Massachusetts; Hall, James, and others attend. This consolidates the Jung-Freud alliance and introduces psychoanalysis to the U.S.(University College London)
1911–1913 – The Adler and Jung secessions
Alfred Adler criticizes the libido theory and Oedipus complex, emphasizing social inferiority and power. He resigns from the Vienna society in 1911 and founds Individual Psychology.
Carl Gustav Jung, initially Freud’s “crown prince,” diverges over the universality of infantile sexuality, the nature of the unconscious (personal vs collective), and religion. Their break (1912–13) leads Jung to found Analytical Psychology.(Encyclopedia.com)
1912–1913 – The Secret Committee
To defend orthodoxy after the Jung crisis, Freud creates a “Secret Committee” (Jones, Ferenczi, Abraham, Rank, Sachs; Eitingon joins 1919; Anna Freud later replaces Rank). Members vow mutual loyalty and doctrinal consistency; the move itself creates a politicized inner circle that will later fracture.(Wikipedia)
Berlin & Budapest as laboratories
Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute (Abraham, Eitingon, Simmel) and its free clinic pioneer the three-part training model (personal analysis, coursework, supervised cases), which becomes the standard worldwide.(Wikipedia)
The institute’s staff includes Franz Alexander, Radó, Fenichel, Horney, Reich, Bernfeld, Klein – many later emigrate and seed American and British psychoanalysis.(Wikipedia)
In Budapest, Ferenczi pushes experiments in technique (mutual analysis, elasticity of the frame) and a trauma-centered, relational reading of neurosis, provoking unease in Freud and the Committee.(ResearchGate)
Rank and Ferenczi conflicts
Otto Rank’s Trauma of Birth (1924) foregrounds separation trauma and proposes briefer, more active treatments. Freud and Jones see this as a deviation from Oedipal primacy; Rank is marginalized and eventually exits the movement.(ResearchGate)
Ferenczi’s late papers on child abuse and analyst authority (early 1930s) strain his relation with Freud; after his death (1933) his work is sidelined for decades, then revived in today’s relational/trauma traditions.(ResearchGate)
Lay analysis and professionalization
The “lay analysis” controversy (centered on Theodor Reik) leads Freud to defend non-medical analysts in The Question of Lay Analysis (1926), against both state regulation and some medically trained colleagues. The IPA tries to mediate, while the U.S. branch drifts toward MD-only standards.(ipa.world)
New theories: drive, ego, and objects
Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and The Ego and the Id (1923) introduce the death drive and structural model (id–ego–superego).
Anna Freud and later Hartmann, Kris, Loewenstein develop ego psychology, focusing on defenses, adaptation, and conflict-free ego functions.(Wikipedia)
Karl Abraham and Melanie Klein open an “object-relations” direction: early infant fantasies, internal objects, aggression, paranoid-schizoid vs depressive positions.(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Nazism and diasporic reconfiguration
1933–38: Berlin institute is “Aryanized” and attached to the Göring Institute; Jewish analysts flee to London, New York, Jerusalem, and Latin America.(Wikipedia)
Freud’s books are burned; in 1938 he escapes Vienna to London with Anna Freud and dies there in 1939.
British Psychoanalytical Society as crucible
The wartime influx of émigrés (Klein, Glover, Isaacs, Heimann, Balint, others) into an already Anna-Freudian environment creates sharp tensions over child analysis, phantasy, and the ego.
1942–44 – The “Controversial Discussions”
A series of highly structured scientific meetings pits Anna Freud’s ego-psychological, developmentally cautious child analysis against Klein’s focus on the earliest months, symbolic play, and interpretation of aggression. The result is the famous three-group settlement: Kleinian, Anna-Freudian, and “Middle”/Independent (Winnicott, Fairbairn, Balint, Rickman, later Guntrip), each with its own training stream.(British Psychoanalytical Society)
Object-relations and the Independent tradition
Winnicott elaborates the good-enough mother, transitional objects, and the facilitating environment.
Fairbairn reconfigures libido as object-seeking rather than pleasure-seeking.
Bion develops group dynamics and later a sophisticated epistemology (alpha function, container/contained).
These independents mediate between strict Kleinians and Anna-Freudians, and will be central to later relational thought.
1940s–60s – Ego psychology becomes U.S. orthodoxy
In New York and Boston, Hartmann, Kris, Loewenstein, Rapaport, Spitz, Erikson, Jacobson, Mahler, and Brenner consolidate a theory of ego functions, defenses, and structured development. Training institutes tied to the APsaA institutionalize MD-based, long-term analysis, closely allied to psychiatry.(Wikipedia)
Interpersonal/Neo-Freudian critiques
Parallel traditions – Sullivan, Fromm, Horney, Thompson, later Harry Stack Sullivan’s followers – emphasize culture, interpersonal relatedness, and anxiety as field-phenomenon. They often sit awkwardly inside IPA “orthodoxy,” prefiguring the relational turn.(ResearchGate)
Kohut and Self Psychology (Chicago)
In the late 1960s–70s, Heinz Kohut at the Chicago Institute articulates self psychology, centering on narcissistic injury, empathic immersion, and selfobject transferences. His Chicago lectures (published posthumously) document both his theoretical break with drive theory and an institutional conflict with established ego psychology.(Amazon)
Wilhelm Reich and the politics of exclusion
Earlier, Reich’s fusion of Marxism, sexual politics, and character-analysis had already led to his expulsion from the IPA (1934); his later “orgone” work placed him outside mainstream psychoanalysis, illustrating how political radicalism plus theoretical heterodoxy could trigger institutional excommunication.(Encyclopedia.com)
1930s–50s – Lacan’s early work
Jacques Lacan enters the Paris psychoanalytic milieu in the 1930s, linking psychiatry, surrealism, and structuralism. His 1936 “mirror stage” thesis and later seminars (starting 1953) re-read Freud via Saussure, Kojève, and topology.(Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
1953 – Paris schism and the SFP
Conflicts in the Society of Parisian Psychoanalysis (SPP) over training and Lacan’s “variable length sessions” lead Lacan, Lagache and others to form the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). The IPA, uneasy with Lacan’s methods, stalls on recognizing the SFP.(Wikipedia)
1964 – École Freudienne de Paris (EFP)
After the IPA demands Lacan’s removal as training analyst as a condition for recognition, he leaves and founds the École Freudienne de Paris, inventing the model of the “School” as an anti-bureaucratic, theoretically oriented institution.(Wikipedia)
1968–1980 – Splits and dissolution
Debates over Lacan’s procedure of the “Pass” and authority in training provoke further splits, notably the Quatrième Groupe (1968). In 1980 Lacan unilaterally dissolves the EFP, criticizing its drift into dogmatism, and new Lacanian bodies proliferate (École de la Cause Freudienne, AMP, EPFCL, forums of the Lacanian field).(Wikipedia)
Global spread
Lacanian orientations become especially strong in France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and other parts of Latin America, often outside IPA control, creating a parallel global psychoanalytic network.
1983 – Greenberg & Mitchell and the “relational” paradigm
Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell’s Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (1983) re-narrates psychoanalytic history as a struggle between drive-structural and relational/object-relational paradigms and coins “relational” to name a family of theories privileging relationships over drives.(Amazon)
Relational psychoanalysis as a movement
From the mid-1980s, largely in New York, Mitchell, Greenberg, Lew Aron, Jessica Benjamin, Bromberg, and others integrate British object-relations, American interpersonalism, and feminist theory. Technique becomes more mutual, dialogical, and focused on co-constructed experience. This challenges classical neutrality and the one-person model of the mind.(Wikipedia)
Intersubjectivity, attachment, and infant research
Stolorow, Atwood, Orange develop intersubjective systems theory.
Attachment researchers and infant observers (Bowlby, Ainsworth, Stern, Tronick) reshape how analysts think about early development and trauma, influencing both relational and contemporary Kleinian/Bionian lines.(ResearchGate)
Neuropsychoanalysis and empirical bridges
Attempts to connect Freudian ideas with contemporary neuroscience (Solms, Panksepp, others) seek legitimacy in the wider scientific field; some Lacanians, by contrast, insist on the irreducibility of the symbolic.(Pacja)
The IPA remains the main global umbrella, with some 12,000 analysts and ~70 constituent organizations.(Wikipedia)
Parallel networks of Lacanian schools, self-psychology societies, and relational/intersubjective institutes, alongside strong regional traditions (e.g., Argentine Kleinian/Lacanian hybrids; Israeli, South African, and Indian associations), make psychoanalysis a highly plural but still interconnected field.(Histories of Psychoanalysis)
From this vantage point, psychoanalysis looks less like a single theory that fragmented and more like a research tradition organized around a set of shared problems—unconscious conflict, fantasy, desire, transference, and the role of others in psychic life. The institutional conflicts and schisms (Adler, Jung, Rank, Ferenczi, Klein vs Anna Freud, Lacan vs the IPA, Kohut vs ego-psychology, relational vs classical) often map onto deeper tensions: drive vs relation, hierarchy vs dialogue, science vs hermeneutics, medicine vs lay practice. My sense is that the intellectual vitality of psychoanalysis today precisely depends on keeping those tensions alive rather than prematurely resolving them into a system.