Lee Jaffe’s Unifying Approach to Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Lee Jaffe’s presidential plenary paper demonstrates his career-long emphasis on unifying psychoanalysis and its theories. His use of Freud’s various technical concepts to make psychoanalytic theory applicable to talking psychotherapies of all kinds, analytic and nonanalytic, is a notable achievement and a useful pedagogical tool. By valuing common ground and unification, he aligns himself with luminaries such as Wallerstein and Rangell, who had similar goals. In keeping with these values, I offer a schematic outline of what the sort of integrated model valued by Jaffe might include.

What does Neuroscience Offer Psychoanalysis? Commentary on Solms’s “Revision of Drive Theory”

“…Toward those ends, it is useful to review what psychoanalysis is. After all, one finds fierce polemics, both on the APsaA Listserv and in the literature, about whether it is simply a clinical technique, many techniques, a theory, many theories, or a body of knowledge with many applications (see, e.g., Eagle 2021; Jaffe 2021; Sugarman 2021, in press). Nonetheless, many of us of a certain generation were drawn to psychoanalysis because it seemed to offer the most elegant model of human mental functioning, one that could help us understand our patients and guide us in our efforts to treat them.…”